Wireless Web in play for Japan

ore than 30 million wireless phone users in Japan get some form of Internet access. What's more, Java-based applications have just been added to enrich those services. And next month, the world's first third-generation service will be offered in Japan, though only in limited areas. All this is evidence of Japan's prowess in making the wireless Web work, and its success is serving as something of a litmus test for the rest of the world.

Three major industry players-NTT Docomo Corp., KDDI Corp. and J-Phone Communications Co. Ltd.-are duking it out for control of the data-based cellular phone market. Currently, Docomo provides i-mode service using packet Personal Digital Cellular (PDC) communication at 9,800 bits/second. KDDI and J-Phone provide Internet access services using different formats. The linchpin of KDDI's so-called "ez" Web service, run on the company's cdmaOne network, is the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP), while J-Phone provides its J-Sky service using a switched PDC network.

Docomo has taken a large lead in the wireless Internet market thanks to the runaway success of i-mode, which offers more than 1,600 official Web sites that can be accessed from the phone's menu screen and about 10 times that number of independent Web sites, accessible via URL address.

More than 22 million subscribers have signed up for NTT Docomo's service. In January, Docomo added i-appli service, which makes it possible to download up to 10 kbytes of Java applets. The trade-off for the limited size is security, a feature no service had been able to provide until recently. Because transactions are now secure, more businesses are expected to use the service.

J-Phone, meanwhile, offers J-Sky service, which is based on middle-mobile markup language (M-MML), through a 9,800-bit/s PDC switched network. Approximately 580 official Web sites are accessible through this service, and another several thousand became available on J-Sky terminals as of March. Since M-MML is similar to i-mode, some i-mode Web pages are also accessible, a J-Phone spokeswoman said. The spokeswoman said that 6.2 million of J-Phone's 10 million cellular phone subscribers have signed up for the J-Sky service.

WAP-based service
KDDI's ez Web is the only WAP-based service in Japan. The carrier has signed up about 700 official sites. At present, the service cannot incorporate thousands of i-mode sites because WAP and i-mode protocols are incompatible. The ez Web has about 6.7 million subscribers from among KDDI's 15 million cell phone subscribers.

Unlike the rest of the world, where carriers and phone vendors are separate entities and customers enjoy a wide choice of terminals, in Japan carriers and manufacturers collaborate to develop terminals for their services. Thus, Docomo offers i-mode terminals and KDDI provides ez Web terminals. According to some analysts, developing terminals for wireless services, rather than the services themselves, is the driving force of Japan's cell phone market.

Despite that, NTT Docomo is scheduled to launch a new IMT-2000 service at the end of May. The Foma, or Freedom of Mobile Multimedia Access, service initially will be launched in the Tokyo metropolitan area, using direct-spread wideband-CDMA (W-CDMA) technology, At startup, the network specification will be 64 kbits/s for switched communications, 64 kbits/s for upload and 384 kbits/s for download using packet communications.

Docomo said it plans to expand Foma to Osaka and Nagoya, two of Japan's most heavily populated areas, by the end of this year and nationwide by April 2002.

"It is important for Docomo to establish leadership in the market. However, it's doubtful whether many providers can provide services to make full use of 384 kbits/s," said Katsushi Shiga, a senior analyst at Dataquest, a market research firm. At present, mostly young people use the Docomo service, and about 60 percent of the revenue produced by charged content comes from ring tunes and character wallpaper, according to Shiga.

"But this may be a chicken-and-egg issue. It's possible that if the infrastructure were ready, services would follow," Shiga said. "As with i-mode, Docomo intends to establish the network first. But this time applications are not visible; it may be difficult to expect it to take off quickly, like i-mode did. The subscribers will increase slowly this time. Too rapid growth, on the other hand, is not desirable because of the limitation of the infrastructure."

Delayed launch
J-Phone adopted W-CDMA in March but said it would delay until June the launch of a W-CDMA-based service. "We want to make our system compliant with the version of W-CDMA released last December by the Third Generation Partnership Project," or 3GPP, a J-Phone spokesman said. The 3GPP consists of six standardization bodies that are working to build globally applicable specifications for a W-CDMA mobile system.

NTT Docomo is developing its W-CDMA service based on the W-CDMA version released in March 2000. The company will guarantee compatibility with any future evolution of W-CDMA at 3GPP without shifting any extra costs to users, a Docomo spokesman said.

Meanwhile, KDDI, Japan's second-largest carrier, has adopted cdma2000 technology.

"We can upgrade the network making use of the current system [cdmaOne], which has a high affinity [with cdma2000]," said Shigeyoshi Hamada, senior manager of system development at KDDI. Before deploying cdma2000 service in the fall of 2002, KDDI said it will prepare a multistep upgrade plan for its services. Applying cdma2000 technology to the cdmaOne network, KDDI will begin offering 144-kbit/s packet data communication services with improved voice quality at launch.

KDDI said it plans to add Java-based service this summer, but is also considering adopting the binary run-time environment, or Brew, for wireless later this year. Brew, a wireless application development platform created by Qualcomm, uses C and C++ languages, which are more popular than Java.