NTT DoCoMo To Start New Digital Mobile Broadcasting Service in 2011

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 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 expects initial demand will be the strongest, Minobe said. NTT 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 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. NTT also hasn’t disclosed how many models of LTE phones it will field. 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.