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World Cup forces NTT DoCoMo upgrades 
Friday, May 24 2002
by Andrew McLindon


Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo has said it is taking measures to ensure its
network can handle the massive amounts of expected traffic over it during the
World Cup.











 

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.