WASHINGTON — Japan's third-generation wireless system has overcome the "initial poor performance of the handsets" and has past the 1 million mark in subscribers, according to Keiji Tachikawa, president of NTT DoCoMo, Inc.
The WCDMA-based system began operations in October 2001 as the first 3G system that adheres to the IMT-2000 standard, Tachikawa said.
Speaking at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) here Monday (Dec. 8), Tachikawa said Japan's 3G system, called FOMA, had 1 million subscribers in October and will hit the 2- million subscriber mark by next March as service is expanded to more indoor areas and underground spaces in Japan's cities.
By early 2004, next-generation handsets will hit the market, with standby times of 300 hours and weight and volume metrics of 100 grams and 100 cm3. Able to download video, music and other data formats at 300 Kbytes/s, the DoCoMo system supports video "i-motion" clips of up to 40 seconds that can be downloaded or sent as e-mail attachments, he said.
Tokyo-based NTT plans for handsets to be able to play the video even as it is being downloaded, to enhance user experience, he said.
While nonvoice packets are priced separately from voice minutes, the advent of video will mean that packet pricing will need to be revised to accommodate video. Currently, a data packet costs about 0.02¥, but a new pricing scheme will be needed for video to ensure that prices are low enough to attract users.
"At that rate, video would be too expensive, so we need to develop separate pricing for video," Tachikawa said.
By 2005, 3G handsets will operate with processors running at 800 MHz, with roughly 4 Gbytes of external memory and 1.6 Gbytes of internal RAM.
