Japanese Government Approval Likely

NTT DoCoMo to Bow Digital Mobile Broadcasting Service in 2011

October 12, 2010 by Mark Seavy|Top News

TOKYO -- With Japanese government approval almost certain, NTT DoCoMo will begin its next-generation digital mobile broadcasting service in 2011 starting in Tokyo and Osaka, spokeswoman Naoko Minobe told us Friday during a tour of the company’s showroom.

The terrestrial service will use the existing broadcast infrastructure, including Tokyo Tower, to deliver programming packages that are expected with a $3 monthly incremental fee on top of standard cellular service plans, Minobe said. The ISDB-Tmm service, based on Japan’s existing DTV standard, will require a new generation of cellphones, the number and prices of which haven’t been finalized, Minobe said.

Programming for the new service will be supplied by NTT affiliate Mmbi, which is the first authorized Japanese company to use frequencies that will be vacant when Japan shuts down analog broadcasting in 2011. It will provide multimedia services including streaming and file casting, which will store content on consumers’ cellphones for viewing at any time. The company, which has Fuji Television Network and advertising firm Dentsu Inc. among its investors, staked out space separate from NTT DoCoMo at the CEATEC Japan show with a garish pink booth.

The mobile service will gradually be rolled out across Japan starting in Tokyo and Osaka where NTT DoCoMo expects initial demand will be the strongest, Minobe said. NTT DoCoMo has 55 million subscribers, 90 percent of whom subscribe to the company 3G cellular service, she said. The mobile broadcast network is expected to be available to 52 percent of Japan’s population at launch and 92 percent within five years, NTT executives have said.

NTT will spend about $523 million on building infrastructure for the new network, about half the amount rival KDDI and partner Qualcomm projected for building out a MediaFLO-based service. The Radio Regulatory Council, an advisory panel to the Japanese government’s Internal Affairs and Communications Department, in September chose NTT over KDDI to operate the new mobile broadcast service largely because it presented a more cost-effective business plan that will make it easier for content providers to enter the field. NTT also had secured base stations for the service with more certainty than KDDI, the government panel said. KDDI argued that needed it to make additional investments in base stations to ensure a solid coverage area. NTT will end up spending more to resolve service-related issues, KDDI said. NTT also is committed to offering the service to KDDI customers, while KDDI wouldn’t make a similar promise to NTT subscribers, the government agency said.

"We feel that we have to offer a low-cost service because if we won’t no one will subscribe,” said Minobe. She noted Qualcomm’s MediaFLO charges $14 monthly in the U.S. for service available through AT&T and Verizon.

Meanwhile, NTT DoCoMo in December will introduce its Long Term Evolution (LTE) service, starting with a data card and adding cellphones by mid-2011, Minobe said. LTE, being deployed by AT&T, Verizon and others in the U.S., promises maximum 75 Mbps/300 Mbps upload/download speeds versus 5.7 Mbps/14 Mbps for the incumbent 3G service. The pricing for the USB-based data cards and LTE service hasn’t been set, Minobe said. The company also hasn’t disclosed how many models of LTE phones it will field, she said. It has Fujitsu, Panasonic, Samsung, Sharp and Sony Ericsson among its cellphone suppliers. The LTE data cards will initially target notebook PCs, Minobe said.

The introduction of LTE is expected to spur the arrival of cloud-based services. To that end, Fujitsu at CEATEC last week showed a prototype LTE phone that had two screens. In a demonstration of a photo-sharing application, images stored in the phone could be moved to the “cloud” with a swipe of a finger on the lower touch screen. The upper screen then allowed the user to move the images to a file. The phone folded into a conventional clamshell and only when it was opened up were the two screens revealed.

NTT said it has no plans to abandon cellphones based on Nokia’s Symbian operating system, despite its being one of the few remaining carriers to support the software. NTT currently offers nine Symbian-based models, the majority of them from Sharp, Minobe said. Samsung and Sony Ericsson have put plans for Symbian-based models on hold as they shift development to Google’s Android platform. Sony Ericsson last installed Symbian on a Vivaz phone introduced in April.

Symbian’s market share dropped to 41 percent in Q2 from 51 percent a year earlier as Android increased to 17 percent from 2 percent, Gartner Group said. Nokia, also is a supplier to NTT, recently introduced Symbian 3-based models that feature greater speed and better touch-screen applications. Another version of the OS is due in 2011. During a tour of its Tokyo showroom, NTT displayed Toshiba’s Windows Mobile-based Dynapocket cellphone alongside Sony Ericsson’s Android-equipped SO-01B Xperia model. NTT also recently began carrying Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy S. The new Windows Phone 7 operating system is expected to be released this fall. “There is demand out there for all the platforms and we feel we should offer our customers as broad a range of cellphones as possible,” Minobe said.

CEATEC Japan Notebook

Hitachi demonstrated at the CEATEC Japan show a 6.6-inch LCD display with 1600x1200 resolution, targeted at tablet PCs. The display features in-plane switching technology that makes the screen easier to view at wider angles, the company said. With a density of 302 pixels per inch, the Hitachi LCD isn’t far from the 326 ppi found in the iPhone 4 and iPod Touch displays. Hitachi also showed a 2.5-inch LCD with 320x240 resolution that uses microelectromechanical (MEMS) and TFT technology. The prototype uses less power than standard LCDs but can handle more colors, Hitachi said. It also has a reflective mode that allows the backlight to be turned off so the user can switch to ambient light or even direct sunlight as a source, Hitachi said. Hitachi said it’s developing the MEMS technology with Pixtronix.

TDK will start production this fall of see-through passive matrix OLEDs at its Ibaraki, Japan, factory, with maximum monthly capacity for 2 million 1-inch panels, Osamu Onitsuka, senior manager of engineering and development for displays, said at the CEATEC Japan show. The plant will initially make two-inch PMOLED cellphone displays from 300x400mm substrates using small-molecule, vapor-deposition production, Onitsuka said. TDK will produce both color and mono PMOLEDs with 320x240 resolution and 300 candelas, Onitsuka said. TDK also demonstrated a 3.5-inch flexible PMOLED with 320x240 resolution and 150 candelas, expected to be available in late 2011, Onitsuka said. The 3.5-inch display is 0.3 mm thick and weighs 0.05 grams, the company said. The flexible panels can be installed on a curved surface with a 25-mm radius, TDK said. The new prototype is one-sixth the thickness of the previous model, it said. The flexible display consists of a protective film, sealing and light emitting layers, standard and transparent electrodes and a flexible resin film substrate that resists shock, the company said.

KDDI said it will launch sales this month of Sharp’s Android-based IS03 AU smartphones at about $480. The phone features a 3.5-inch LCD with 960x640 resolution, 802.11 b/g wireless and 500 MB of DRAM that’s stored in the LCD glass, the company said. The phone is powered by Qualcomm’s 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, it said. It also has a micro SDHC slot and will be packaged with a 2 GB card, a KDDI spokeswoman said. It has a built-in 9.6-megapixel digital camera that can deliver 1,280x720 video, KDDI said.