|
With Japan co-hosting the World Cup and mobile use exploding since the last time the tournament took place, NTT DoCoMo said that along with five of its subsidiaries, it was implementing a range of steps to prevent its networks from overloading during peak times.
The first of these is the boosting of capacity at the companies' base stations located near to the Japanese stadiums hosting games by around 150 percent.
In addition, DoCoMo's proprietary In-Building Mobile Communication System (IMCS) has been installed at several major sports facilities and Yokohama Media Centre to ensure stable communications inside structures that could experience massive traffic.
The companies involved in the plan will also provide stadiums with portable mobile stations on days when matches take place. DoCoMo expects these stations will be used a total of 32 times during the World Cup. DoCoMo also said that it will dispatch engineers to facilities, including base stations located near stadiums, up to 600 times to make certain that equipment and networks run smoothly.
DoCoMo expects most of the traffic to take place before and after games, and during half-time. As such, it said that it may have to place certain restrictions on mobile usage around the stadiums, but it did not elaborate on what these measures would be. However, it said that this would mean that customers located outside of the stadiums would not be affected by the network congestion.
During the last World Cup in France, Internet access there increased four-fold and it is expected that similar, if not higher, levels of activity will take place over mobile networks given the popularity of the SMS and the fact that NTT DoCoMo provides a number of multi-media services such as e-mail and Internet access to over 30 million mobile subscribers in Japan.
|
