Benedict Evans wrote:
>[...]
> Getting back to Japan, why *is* PHS popular? 5.7m customers isn't bad. Put
> another way, why did the arguments that failed to work in Europe (cheaper
> smaller devices, longer battery life) work in Japan? Are there other
> advantages that DECT/CT2 didn't have? Or is it just that DoCoMo wanted to
> build it, so it did?
>[...]
The thing to remember is that PHS failed miserably as a voice network.
The magic formula that allowed the PHS network to stop operating in the
red was arrived at only when DoCoMo married PHS to their analog/digital
(non PHS) voice network and used the PHS side to carry data.
It could be argued that PHS network has yet to pay for itself. About
4 years ago, sales droids were giving away PHS phones to anything that
had a pulse (even hapless gijin) outside Book Boxes and Tsutayas in a
desperate effort to build a (paying) subscriber base. Highschool kids
were hip enough to realize that they could pick up a phone, use it for
the month it was turned on and when it got turned off, they would pick
up a new one the same day. Obviously, this is *not* what the marketing
wizards had in mind when they targeted PHS to the OL/HS market.
The abject failure of PHS as a voice network allowed it to be
marginalized and reinvented as a pay data network (the inter-carrier
billing systems were already there). In other countries, on the other
hand, carriers are still trying to put high speed data networks in
place (and are concerned about the ability of these expensive network
enhancements to pay for themselves). My argument to these carriers is
that they've been too lazy and they should have been building these
enhancements while the building was good. It's a bit late to try to
economically justify network build-outs when the market is cooling...
and it's not like they have an existing failed high speed wireless
data network infrastructure waiting in the wings to make the economic
justification a moot point. On the other hand, other countries have
the relative luxury of deploying infrastrcture over existing cell
networks, rather than having to deploy a seperate micro-cellular
data network (aka PHS).
Some of these early points get missed, as NTT/DoCoMo begins market
iMode to the world and attempts to transition the economic justification
of high speed data network add-ons to existing celluar away from the
problems/requirements NTT/DoCoMo faced at the time. To a degree, it
doesn't matter what network carries the data; however, the 10 years
that it took to deploy PHS microcells to an acceptable level of
coverage and the fact that this network ran/runs in the red are points
that should not be glossed over (you pay now or you pay later, but
in either case you pay)
Also, I know of nobody who acutally uses PHS's ability to operate as
a wireless handset for the home land-line. That feature could also
be argued to be a failure, but since I'm only a sample point of 1
and since there are no real usage statistics it is a difficult point
to argue. It also bugs me that I can't send SMS messages to Japanese
handsets when I'm in Australia or New Zealand, but now that the
Japanese handsets have matured beyond their GSM counterparts, I can
at least address the problem by building my own SMS to e-mail gateway.
[ Did you check the archives? http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]
Received on Thu Jul 26 02:26:56 2001