Japan’s Communication Research Laboratory (CRL) plus NTT Communications, KDDI, Hitachi and Fujitsu are teaming up with the China Academy of Telecommunications Research, the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications and some local carriers to formulate and develop an 4G standard and to fight off the ITU’s standardization bid…
The acceleration of DoCoMo’s fantastically subsidized FOMA handset uptake continues apace, with the company today announcing that subscriptions have just topped 2 million, about 2 months ahead of DoCoMo’s deliberately conservative estimates. (Once bitten, forever shy?) For a benchmark comparison, this places DoCoMo about 2 million handsets ahead of Vodafone K.K.’s 3G subscriber base and about 8 million behind KDDI’s. Still, it’s a nice christening present for the new and beautiful 900i handsets that the company is going to let loose on the network next month. See the DoCoMo press release for more details.
Despite a decentish 3Q. It looks as if Vodafone K.K.’s first good subsciber uptake month in a while – last December – has been too little and too late to prevent Japan’s number 3 carrier from posting a wider full-year loss for the year to March 31, 2004. Today, the carrier announced that its 3Q consolidated operating revenues increased from 385 billion yen for the three months to September to 1.28 trillion yen for the quarter to December 30, 2003.
“The single biggest benefit that was discovered in Japan was that you need to be fair in sharing the revenues with the content developer. It is not fair to say to a Disney or a CNN, ‘Give me half your money, and then I will put you on my network.’ DoCoMo approached this with the rough idea they would like to keep 10% and give the content developer 90%,” says Tomi Ahonen, a long-time industry watcher, prolific mobinet author, and ex-Nokia consultant. He points to Japan’s stark contrast with Europe, where operators took a 50/50 or 60/40 approach. “Under these terms, [European operators are] very unlikely to attract a large community of developers.” He also has a pretty good ideas as to what EU and the US must do in 2004 to establish successful 3G services. Log on to hear these comments and much more in this lively interview.
With the launch of Casio’s A5403CA for KDDI, Sharp’s SH505iS for DoCoMo, and our old friend the V601SH from Sharp to Vodafone, Japan has truly entered the 2-megapixel era. Beyond this, KDDI is planning A5502K with a xenon lamp flash unit this month. With two megapixels and onboard electronic flash, photography with mobile phones will make major inroads into digital camera territory.
KDDI seems to have heard its master’s voice and has just announced that it is following Qualcomm into India. In a separate announcement, KDDI also said it was introducing anti-virus measures into its phones in 2005. KDDI said today, January 19, that it is forming Indo-Fuji Information Technology Pvt. Ltd. with Fujitsu Platform Technologies taking a 12% stake, to provide network construction and spice up international data transmission services for the rapidly exploding Indian market.
