Looking to spread its wireless world into Asia, QUALCOMM Monday said it has signed a non- binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) with Asia Pacific Broadband Wireless Communications (APBW), the first operator in the region to commercialize 3G services using CDMA2000 technology.
Japan’s mobile phone giant NTT DoCoMo has reported a quarterly profit, helped by strong growth at its 3G service and solid per-user revenues, with no big overseas losses this time. DoCoMo earned 196.82 billion yen (US$1.64b) in group net profit in the first quarter to June 30 on sales of 1.25 trillion yen.
Tim Harrison’s speech was the highlight of Wireless Japan 2003 for many — an oasis of information in an otherwise dreary lineup of pat speeches by DoCoMo’s Tachikawa and KDDI’s Onodera. Harrison talked eloquently about the guiding principles that have let V-Live grow to 1.5 million, the lessons learned from Japan, and how their service is different from the domestically brilliant, and so far internationally dismal, performance of various i-modes.
Japan’s wireless broadband networks are rapidly accelerating with the development of cutting-edge technologies and Wireless Japan 2003 is the place to see it all. We’ve put together quite a package from this year’s show, including an on-camera interview with Vodafone Global Content Services’ Tim Harrison on his view on how V-Live is different from i-mode. We grabbed shots of Sanyo’s OLED 3G concept-model handsets and KDDI Labs’ new TV-Mobile unit; and caught up with Gartner Japan’s Mitsuyama-san who gave us her take on this year’s conference. Full Program Run-time 15:35
While Asia Pacific Broadband Wireless Communication Inc. was celebrating its launch of the nation’s first 3G mobile services yesterday, telecom industry analysts said the high-speed mobile Internet service is not expected to become mainstream in the Taiwan market in the short term.
China, the world’s largest market for cell phones, is aggressively developing a homegrown technology that can run the next generation of mobile telephone networks, challenging the traditional dominance of American and European companies. During the 1990s, as China spent $10 billion to build a national mobile telephone network, foreign companies reaped most of the rewards. Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia produced much of the equipment that runs the networks and many of the phones on them.
