Japan Telecom has announced its 3G mobile service will be delayed until June 2002.
Japan Telecom (JT) has announced that its majority-owned mobile subsidiary J-Phone, Japan’s third-largest mobile operator with around 10 million customers, will not offer 3G services until June 2002. This is a six-month delay on the expected launch date of December 2001. JT said that the reason for the delay was a combination of more testing than originally expected and changes to the technical specifications.
3G delays come as no surprise. Firms including Nokia and Alcatel have admitted that services will be delayed, while recently operators such as Korea’s SK Mobile and Italy’s TIM have announced that their own rollout dates will be slowed.
However, J-Phone’s problems might be more of a headache than most. Japan is the only major market where a 3G service is expected this year – NTT DoCoMo expects to launch this May. Since DoCoMo is the dominant mobile operator, with over 50 million customers including 20 million mobile Internet subscribers, if the launch goes well it will be able to migrate a sizeable number of people onto 3G services. This would give it a major first-mover advantage when J-Phone’s service eventually launches.
In addition, the delay will be bad news for Vodafone and BT. Both firms have large investments in JT and J-Phone, driven partially by their desire to gain 3G experience before they roll their networks out in Europe. A delay in rollout will leave both firms at a disadvantage – especially compared with operators such as KPN and AT&T Wireless, which have alliances with DoCoMo.
Yet all this assumes DoCoMo’s service will launch successfully. The tide is certainly against DoCoMo on this: the last thing anyone in the industry needs is another disaster like WAP, launching with too much hype before the service is ready. J-Phone will be watching DoCoMo like a hawk for problems and solutions before it launches its own service. If the dominant operator does run into trouble, J-Phone and its British partners will find themselves in a much-improved position.
