Vodafone Japan
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Vodafone K.K. (ボーダフォン株式会社), also known as Vodafone Japan, is the Japanese subsidiary company of mobile phone operator Vodafone.
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Technology
Vodafone Japan currently operates both PDC (Japanese 2G) and W-CDMA (UMTS 3G) networks. Vodafone-Japan's 3G network is compatible with UMTS and supports transparent global roaming for existing UMTS subscribers from other countries outside Japan, but not for GSM subscribers.
History
The company was originally founded in 1991 as the mobile phone division of Japan Telecom under the name Digital Phone (デジタルホン). J-Phone Co., Ltd. (J-フォン) was formed in 1999 by the merging of Digital Phone Group (DPG, 3 local companies) and Digital TU-KA Group (DTG, 6 local companies, not to be confused with TU-KA). Japan Telecom owned a stake of 45.1%. In October 2001, the British mobile phone group Vodafone increased its share to 66.7% of Japan Telecom and 69.7% of J-Phone. On October 1, 2003 the name of the company and the service brand was officially changed to Vodafone.
Services
J-Phone has been growing steadily for a decade by continuously introducing new services and enhancements such as SkyWalker for PDC, SkyMelody ringtone download, the famous Sha-Mail picture mail introduced on the basis of camera phones developed by SHARP, the mobile multimedia data service J-Sky modeled after NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, and advanced Java services based on JSCL, which are modeled after NTT DoCoMo's DoJa based i-Appli.
Recently however, this trend has been reversed and Vodafone started losing customers: In January 2005 Vodafone Japan lost 58,700 customers and in February 2005 Vodafone Japan lost 53,200 customers (while competitors NTT DoCoMo won 184,400 customers and KDDI/AU won 163,700 customers, and Willcom won 35,000).
Vodafone changed the name of its multimedia data services from J-Sky to Vodafone Live!, and used J-Sky's principles and technologies and business models to introduce Vodafone Live! in Vodafone's other markets. Thus Vodafone Live! has it's origin in J-Phone's J-Sky.
Vodafone Japan recently changed the page description language of Vodafone Live! to the WAP page description language.
While DoCoMo's FOMA 3G service has attracted 10 million subscribers until February 2005, and KDDI/AU's 3G service has attracted over 17 million subscribers until February 2005, Vodafone's 3G service only attracted 527,300 subscribers. Vodafone-3G has not acquired many subscribers because Vodafone cut back investments in 3G services in Japan in 2002/3, and therefore handsets largely do not fully match needs and preferences of Japanese customers.
As of end February 2005, Vodafone Japan has 15.0991 million customers, among which 657,300 are 3G subscribers and 12.907 million are Vodafone live! users.
Timeline
1991-07: Tokyo Digital Phone established
1994-04: J-Phone starts PDC cellular service in the 1.5 GHz band, 10 MHz bandwidth
1997-11: J-Phone launches SkyWalker SMS service designed by Aldiscon and Ericsson for PDC
1998-11: J-Phone launches SkyMelody ringtone download service
1999-12: J-Phone launches J-Sky wireless Internet service modelled after NTT-DoCoMo's i-mode, which was launched in February 1999.
2000-11: J-Phone launches Sha-Mail (写メール) picture messaging service using the world's first camera phones developed by SHARP
2001-06: J-Phone launches Java service with well-designed JSCL library
2002-12: J-Phone launches W-CDMA 3G service the first time
2003-10: J-Phone company name is changed to Vodafone, and J-Sky name is changed to Vodafone Live!
2004-10: Vodafone relaunches the 3G services in Japan a second time