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Keiji Tachikawa announced that NTT had signed a deal with the number three US mobile operator, AT&T wireless, which will carry i-mode in the US. I-mode has around 31 million subscribers in Japan and is due to be rolled-out in Germany in the coming weeks, followed by a launch in the Netherlands and Belgium on various KPN mobile networks in the three EU nations.
As is the situation with its European counterparts, AT&T Wireless is 15 percent owned by NTT and the announcement of its pending launch in US, though important, comes as no great surprise.
Tachikawa made the announcement at the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association (CTIA) Wireless 2002 conference in Florida according to a report on CNET's News.com "Our partner AT&T Wireless is now preparing services that will be interoperable with i-mode," Tachikawa said at the event. "It will happen this year."
Through i-mode, users in Japan have been able to use a variety of mobile Internet applications and content, such as entertainment and information including travel, games, weather, restaurant guides, maps, polyphonic ringing tones, pictures and more.
I-mode has been highly lucrative in Japan for NTT and is considered an important stepping-stone on the road to 3G services. It is thought that services like i-mode can help to familiarise users with advanced multimedia mobile services, and will subsequently encourage them to spend more.
The US, the world's biggest economy, may very well be the biggest challenge NTT has yet to face. But if successful, the implications of i-mode's entrance in to the US market could have wide reaching effects on the industry around the globe.
Mobile phone penetration is slightly higher in Europe than in the US and is much higher in Japan. Subsequently, basic mobile data services such a text messaging and even WAP are far more popular here and in Asia, compared to America. There are a variety of reasons for this, including data interoperability difficulties between American networks, and a reluctance on the part of operators to sell pre-paid mobile phones until recently.
But i-mode's entrance on the American scene has the potential to revolutionise the US market, if its popularity can reach the heights it has hit in Japan.
The importance of i-mode to the industry cannot be understated. I-mode is what drove NTT DoCoMo to become the mobile technology powerhouse that it has become and led it to subsequently launch what many consider to be the world's first true 3G mobile service called FOMA.
In that vein, NTT DoCoMo made another important announcement this week. The Japanese company said that it has begun constructing an experimental system for fourth-generation (4G) packet wireless communications featuring transmission speeds in excess of 100 mega-bit per second (Mbps) downlinks and 20 Mbps uplinks. The company hopes to launch a 4G commercial network in 2010.
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