Re: Cellular phone networks in US, Europe and Japan - what data rates ?

Frank,

Here are some quick answers (we are a high-tech consulting company
based in Tokyo working with foreign and Japanese companies in the 
imode and wireless internet area in Japan). So some of the answers
are from our first-hand work & business.

Actually most of the answers to your questions (and more) you can
find in our imode-faq:
http://www.eurotechnology.com/imode/faq.html

Frank Steuer wrote:
> 
> Hi !
> 
> I wonder why the wireless interent is so popular in Japan, why in the US
> everybody talks about and in Europe it is not very popular but almost
> everybody owns a cell phone ?!?

For a start, let's remind us the over 80% of the world's wireless internet
users today are in Japan, and only 5% are in Europe.

There is not one single reason for wireless internet's success in Japan.
Some major reasons are compelling content, passionate focus on customer
needs and convenience (not on handset maker's or service provider's
convenience as in some other regions of the world), packet switching as
you say below, a good and convenient microbilling system etc.
There are several other reasons, like that there are much better handsets
in Japan than in Europe and USA.

> I know that one reason in Europe are the costs. It is still a connection
> based charging and users pay every second they are online. In Japan I
> think it is a packet switched network and so the users pay for the
> amount of transfered data ?!

Yes, but not in all cases. There are several competing mobile internet
systems in Japan and they have different charging models. The biggest
Japanese wireless internet service provider NTT-DoCoMo has a packet
switched network for imode, and users pay for the number of packets, users
do not pay for connection time at all. So if they look at one page
for 1 second or 3 hours is exactly the same charge as long as the number
of information packets downloaded are the same. However, there are other
charges as well for premium (subscription) sites etc.
You can find detailed information about the charging models, an example
of a typical customer's monthly imode bill, of the payment flows and other
business model information in our imode report, which you can directly
download in pdf format here:
http://www1.mightywords.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp?theisbn=EB00019481

> In Europe you can only get 9.2 kbit/s with GSM and up tp 43 kbit/s using
> HSCSD - bu then it is even more expensive.
> 
> How is this in the US and in Japan. What are the current availble data
> rates and the costs ?

In Japan there is a variety of different data rates available now on competing
systems. The dominant imode has a maximum data rate of 9.6 kbytes/sec, but
it will usually be lower depending on the load on the system.

As above, the data packet charge and charging models differ for
competing 
mobile internet service providers. For the dominating imode system the charge
is YEN 0.3 (= US$ 0.3cent) per packet of 128 byte. As explained above these
are however not the only charges users have to pay. You can find a detailed
analysis of charges, typical bills, business models and cash flows in our
imode report:
http://www1.mightywords.com/asp/bookinfo/bookinfo.asp?theisbn=EB00019481

Hope this helps,

Gerhard Fasol
Eurotechnology Japan K. K.
http://www.eurotechnology.com/
fasol@eurotechnology.com

> 
> frank
> ----------------------------------------------------
> Frank Steuer
> steuer@ece.orst.edu
> for public PGP-key: finger -l steuer@ece.orst.edu
> ----------------------------------------------------

Received on Tuesday, 7 November 2000 03:00:18 UTC