Ken,
You're right that most consumers are put off by the up-front annual or 6
month investment for b-mobile.
Still I don't see WLAN being a threat to PHS in the foreseeable future (if
ever): roaming, coverage, etc. basically the services are just too
different. Lots of users are even using PHS at home as their main connection
because they aren't in reach of ADSL services and don't have or want an NTT
fixed line; these users won't be able to switch to WLAN (of course other
services may be competitors). However ubiquitous WLAN becomes, in a country
the size of Japan, you're going to be hard pushed to create a service where
the user can be 90%+ sure of getting a connection anywhere and this
can-connect-anywhere factor is just too important.
As for 3G I don't see how, while they are still struggling to get good
coverage in urban areas, these services are going to push the price of PHS
down. Flat rate PHS users regularly download 100s of MBs/month. FOMA /1X
would need to radically rethink their packet charges to compete with that
kind of usage. (Currently 200MB costs around 32,000 yen even on the highest
FOMA usage plan.)
Cheers,
David
Received on Tue Aug 6 05:54:52 2002