Qualcomm
Qualcomm

Qualcomm

Fall Roundup of Hot Topics: Packet Fees, WLAN, and 3G Roaming

A couple of interesting events took place in Tokyo last Friday. The American Chamber of Commerce hosted their Fourth Annual E-Business Summit, while Credit Suisse First Boston’s lead telecoms analyst Mark Berman conducted a 3G/Wireless Internet Conference. Some interesting points came out of both. Afterwards, Kobe University’s Jeff Funk commented that the predicted fall in 3G packet prices is “interesting,” while Matsumoto’s additional arguments — that the US is a car society and thus Japan’s experience isn’t relevant — was not valid since “SMS is doing well in Europe and DoCoMo claim that i-mode revenues per person are independent of the region in Japan.”

Deconstructing 3G Culture

NTT DoCoMo took it square on the chin this week, announcing it would book extraordinary losses of 573 billion yen against its investments in three major foreign partners, KPN, AT&T Wireless, and Hutchison 3G. The company cited the slowdown in the global telecommunications market, and it would be natural to suspect the Sanno Park Tower strategists are back in their corner, applying ice and stitching wounds. Industry watchers, meanwhile, are having a field day. hOWEVER, this week’s write-down represents mere pachinko pocket change for DoCoMo, and, as potentially one of Japan’s (and by extension, the world’s) most profitable companies, the carrier is well on its way to creating something that the Europeans are still trying to sort out: a functioning W-CDMA network.

Mobile Madness at the Fall Tokyo Game Show

Mobile Madness at the Fall Tokyo Game ShowBy platform, mobile games (mostly Java, as far as we could see) represented 9.2 percent of the 393 new titles announced at the TGS, a significant if yet modest chunk of the overall game market. This was up steeply from 4.1 percent of 339 titles at the fall 2001 show, but still not equal to the 11.0, 14.7, and 17.1 percent shares seen at the spring 2001 (309 new titles), fall 2000 (334 new titles), and spring 2000 (380 new titles) shows, respectively. We have lots of Java screen savers,” said Taito Corporation at the DoCoMo booth; Seoul-based game maker GameVIL comes ashore to leverage made-in-Korea BREW expertise (KTF’s BREW allows 200KB downloads — the standard for KDDI to beat?); and advice on creating successful Java services from PCCW: “Prepare a good environment for the developers.” Daniel had a splitting headache, but this program rocks!