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Next week's Japanese rollout of FOMA, the 3G mobile communication service from DoCoMo, will be partly based on Irish technology from Iona Technologies.
NTT DoCoMo has adopted the Iona e-business platform as the distributed computing infrastructure and application server core for NTT DoCoMo's network management system. This system is being deployed in Japan as part of NTT's 3G mobile telecommunications service, Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access (FOMA).
"With a very large-scale project such as FOMA, the fact that Iona's e-business platform technology shoulders a central role within the system is very much top-of-mind for our organisation," said Shinya Saito, managing director of Iona Technologies Japan Ltd. He said the system was bound to be examined extensively in many markets throughout the world because of the scope of the FOMA project and its demand for a network management system requiring high reliability.
The launch of NTT's highly anticipated network in early October will come after a four-month delay and two years of expectations. Although some debate exists about whether the system will truly be the world's first 3G network, there remains little doubt that FOMA will be the world's fastest and most advanced generation of mobile phone networking.
The rollout of the network has already been delayed from its original May launch due to technical glitches and an unstable network. These problems forced the company to scale down the May launch to a trial service, but the company now claims the service is set to launch, glitch-free, next week. The system will operate 40 times faster than DoCoMo's already hugely successful i-mode.
DoCoMo is now proceeding with construction of a network usage management system serving as the intelligence centre in a new infrastructure for the 3G service. Iona, along with NEC, has been providing ongoing services and support in system development and integration with the Japanese company.
According to Iona, in scale and scope, FOMA's intelligence core is the largest of its kind and features significant integrated management functionality. The system will use the Iona e-business platform to address the FOMA network management system's needs for component-based communication functionality.
DoCoMo's new system will serve as a test for European operators who will doubtlessly monitor its success while they continue to build their own UMTS networks. In the past few years, European operators have spent USD100 billion on 3G licenses, to the dismay of investors and customers who are now beginning to question whether the cost was justified and whether the service will ever come to fruition here.
While DoCoMo's stock, like almost all of the major telecoms, has been hit by the tech slump, it has performed better than many of its counterparts in Europe, where shares achieved record highs in 2000 only to reach record lows in 2001.
DoCoMo claims the FOMA service will be profitable in four years, but some experts are not convinced the service will operate smoothly or bring in revenues as high as those initially envisioned.
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