Japan’s 3G uptake exceeds one million
Japanese telcos giant NTT DoCoMo said Wednesday subscriptions to its FOMA 3G mobile phone service exceeded one million the day before.
NTT DoCoMo first began to rollout high-speed data services in October 2001, a fact which has given it strategic advantage over rivals such as Vodafone, formerly J-Phone, and KDDI.
DoCoMo said FOMA services were boosting subscriber uptake at a rate of more than 200,000 per month.
Better handsets, battery life, a greater array of video and picture services, as well as wider reception coverage (now 96 percent of the Japanese population is in service range), have been highlighted as reasons for the sharp rise.
But DoCoMo is positioned in the shadows of KDDI which has a massive subscriber base.
KDDI’s ‘AU’ mobile unit offers high-speed services on a different format but has more than 10 million subscribers.
