| DoCoMo's 4G Reseach |
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8th March , 2004 |
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ASIA
: CBS MarketWatch.com : It may not be the Central Intelligence Agency,
but NTT DoCoMo also operates its research and development center as
if it were a top-secret facility.
Located 30 miles south of Tokyo in hilly inland overlooking Tokyo Bay, DoCoMo's 27-acre R&D complex is home to almost 1,200 employees, or about a sixth of its entire workforce. DoCoMo invests nearly 130 billion yen ($1.1 billion) annually in R&D, or about three percent of its sales. On Tuesday, Japan's biggest mobile-phone carrier allowed journalists inside the company's R&D center for the first time in several years -- all in the name of demonstrating what so-called fourth-generation will look like when it rolls out the advanced mobile service in 2010. It's all about speed. Fourth-generation services would allow for datatransfer speeds of up to 20 megabytes per second for uplinks and 100 megabytes per second for downlinks -- up to 260 times faster than DoCoMo's popular 3G services, which allow for downlinks of 384 kilobytes per second. "A mobile carrier investing this much money on research and development is rare in the world," says Kota Kinoshita, DoCoMo's executive vice president and chief technical officer. DoCoMo has been in the spotlight a lot recently. It reportedly wanted to buy AT&T Wireless (AWE: news, chart, profile) of the United States but was turned off by the heated bidding war betweenVodafone (VOD: news, chart, profile) and Cingular Wireless, which ultimately bought America's third-biggest wireless carrier for a whopping $41 billion. Of late, DoCoMo has reportedly been considering selling its 20 percent stake in 3 UK due to frustration with its British partner's struggle to get subscribers for its i-mode service, which is popular in Japan. Some analysts are skeptical about 4G given DoCoMo's (DCM: news, chart, profile) already struggles with 3G. "What may likely decide the fate and popularity of 4G would boildown to a simple payoff of costs and services," said Nagayuki Yamagishi, senior strategist at UFJ Tsubasa Securities. "DoCoMo failed in its three-generation service FOMA. If a user just needs to watch television on the cell phone, 4G's high-speed data transfers won't be necessary." |
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