J-Phone's 3G service gets off to miserable start
.c Kyodo News Service
TOKYO, Dec. 20 (Kyodo) - (EDS: REWRITING WITH DELAY IN LAUNCH OF SALE AT RETAIL OUTLETS)
J-Phone Co.'s third-generation (3G) mobile phone service got off to a miserable start Friday, with retail outlets forced to delay the start of sales due to a lack of products.
J-Phone, a unit of Britain's Vodafone Group PLC, was unable to deliver the handsets in time for the official launch date, a development which retailers blamed on the inability to fine-tune the handsets and telecommunications networks to enable the 3G service in time for the launch day.
A little more than 100 handsets have been delivered to some 1,000 J-Phone retail outlets throughout the nation by the end of Friday, officials at J-Phone retailers said.
The company is not sure when it will be able to deliver the latest mobile handsets to all of the outlets, they said.
''We will scramble to manufacture the handsets so that they can be marketed as quickly as possible,'' a J-Phone official said.
Many retail outlets came under a barrage of complaints from customers who had contracts to buy the handsets.
The company's attitude of publicizing the debut date irrespective of the degree of development of the new handsets and relevant telecom networks may draw public flak, industry officials said.
J-Phone said it had planned to start selling the handsets on Friday through some 1,000 outlets in urban areas where the new 3G services will be available. The company has another group of 1,000 affiliated shops in rural areas.
But the new 3G handsets were put on shelves only at 31 of the urban shops with only one J-Phone outlet in Tokyo's 23 wards offering the high-tech gadget, the company acknowledged.
J-Phone had alerted the retail outlets around Wednesday of the possibility that the handsets may not be delivered in time, according to the retailers.
Then, the retail outlets began to recount the situation surrounding the delay to customers, who had contracts to buy the handsets, they said.
J-Phone has lagged behind such rivals as KDDI Corp. and NTT DoCoMo Inc. in launching 3G mobile handsets.
J-Phone had initially planned to launch the 3G service a year earlier.
But J-Phone's plans to offer 3G services worldwide hit a snag because new network systems for such services have yet to be built in other countries, particularly in Europe, in the wake of the burst of the information-technology bubble.
J-Phone has said the users of the new handsets will be able to place calls in more than 50 countries using the same handset, as the 3G service uses the phone network of Vodafone, the biggest mobile phone service provider in the world.
J-Phone said it aims to sell 1 million handsets by the end of fiscal 2003 to March 31, 2004.
The 3G service allows its users to receive and make calls, send and receive e-mail messages, conduct high-speed data communications worldwide, and surf the Internet.
12/20/02 08:34 EST |
