(keitai-l) Re: International Usage

hi Benjamin the roaming guy,

why should support a technology that has no market ... WAP?

I happen to be one who don't like PHS so much, though there're
a lot of clever designs and it's playing a good role as "poor
man's WLAN".

PHS was designed as "poor man's mobile" and had a fundamental
problem in what marketing position it should take - it never
even had chance to compete with the costly PDC network.  it's
market overlaps more with the public phone boxes.

in the early 1990s, 3 operators provided CT-2 service in the UK
and all of them bankrupted 3 years later when the Japanese
started to roll out the PHS service in 1995.  now all the three
Japanese operators had already bankrupted in 1998-99, ... in a
Japanese way.

before we do anything, we should have a good study of the market,
set conditions as the base of business/technology development.

in wireless, the use patterns of the voice and data services are
a little bit different in that the voice needs more coverage and
mobility.  for voice and light data we have GSM already and for
heavier data we have Wi-Fi, where is the room left for PHS?

some words about WAP & i-mode again:

the Unwired Planet guys assumed that the wireless Internet usage
would be similar to the voice calls - actually one application
of the early UP.Products was for a police department to retrieve
data while patrolling in the streets.

while the designers of i-mode thought more about fixed Internet,
usage like that of the PHS/WLAN.  i-mode is not too bad if used
in this way.  the real usage pattern is somewhere in between so
that WAP and i-mode moved one step towards each other.

PHS is more expensive than PDC if one tries to provide similar
coverage, and its last stronghold, the 64 kb/s data, will be
eliminated by WLAN in half to one year's time (you can have
unlimited voice/video phone calls with WLAN).

thanks to PHS, Japanese mobile operators used to be reluctant
to extend repeaters and leak-cables to the underground, that
Japan is still suffering.

cheers,

Ken


From: Benjamin <bkml@mac.com>
Reply-To: keitai-l@appelsiini.net
To: keitai-l@appelsiini.net
Subject: (keitai-l) Re: International Usage
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2002 15:33:56 +0900


On Thursday, July 4, 2002, at 07:47 , Ken Chang wrote:

>yes, as Benjamin said, why bother to use a Japanese mobile in
>the US while it doesn't even work in Japan (in another network).
>
>Christopher, if you mean mobile phones that're made by Japanese
>manufacturers, then Sanyo is an agressive company who now supplies
>cdmaOne/2000 handsets in the US and Korea.  Sprint PCS has a flap
>color Sanyo handsets (SCP-5150) for sometime and is working with
>Sanyo to implement FlashPoint's technology for imaging service.

Ken, I believe Christopher's remark was in relation to roaming services
(or the lack thereof) for Japanese subscribers. After all the topic is
"International Usage".

Before that background, the answer "why bother to use a Japanese mobile
in the US" is "because that's what you happen to have and because it is
so much hassle to get a rental phone for the few days you're in the US".

Thus, Cristopher's idea "If the phones can't work with a US network, why
not roll out a Japanese hot spot network in the US" is sound.

However, the technology you would use for that is clearly PHS, not PDC.

I stated in my earlier post that the white papers which circulated
within PHS MoU did not seem to have led to anything ... I wasn't up to
date and I apologise for the misleading remark ... Fact, is that as of
May 15, 2002, DDI Pockets and FITEL (PHS operator in Taiwan) have a
unidirectional roaming service operational for Taiwanese PHS users to
roam while visiting Japan.

http://www.nikkeibp.asiabiztech.com/wcs/leaf?CID=onair/asabt/news/185744

So, PHS is now ready to do international roaming. Roaming service for
Japanese PHS users visiting Taiwan may sooner or later also be
introduced. Thailand and China could also follow.

And unlike CDMA One roaming, the PHS roaming service also allows you to
use the 64Kbit/s internet service while you roam.

As PHS has been approved in the US ...

http://www.phsmou.com/worldwide/index.html

it should be feasible and viable to roll-out PHS hot spots in the US in
areas with many Japanese tourists and also in and around buildings with
major Japanese companies. After all, PHS gear is very cheap. You could
probably deploy PHS hot spots all over Universal City or in all Vegas
casinos or all over Manhattan for the money you would spend on one
single radio tower for a cellular network.

Low cost network - high spending users who tend to cluster in specific
places. Yep, that could work and it would probably be rather profitable.

Anybody in the US who would like to give that a closer look ?

regards
benjamin



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