Someone asked about at home in Japan this on mobile phones and internet access actually quite good.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Eriko Amaha in Tokyo
Issue cover-dated August 12, 1999
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Tomohiko Tanaka won't leave home without it. His constant companion is a special mobile phone that gives him access to the Internet. At the touch of a button, the 22-year-old college student can keep up with the news, check his train time or, most important of all, find out the score of his favourite baseball team--the Tokyo Yomiuri Giants--on his tiny phone screen. "I carry it with me 24 hours a day," says Tanaka.
He is one of the many people who now use their phones not just to talk, but as an on-line terminal to send e-mails, buy books, make reservations and transfer funds between bank accounts. The mobile-Internet service that makes this possible, known as "i-mode," was pioneered in Asia by Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Mobile Communications Network, known as NTT DoCoMo. Two other communications firms, IDO and DDI, quickly followed with their own such services.
DoCoMo began its i-mode service in February and has since attracted 857,000 subscribers. More recently, growth has been picking up speed: Since the beginning of July, the company has signed up 80,000 new subscribers every week. (IDO and DDI, which launched their services in April, have 45,000 and 100,000 customers, respectively.) This month, DoCoMo expects that a total of 1 million people will be connected to cyberspace via its i-mode services. The company estimates that the total number of subscribers to all services will reach 30 million by 2010.
The amazing speed of i-mode penetration and the huge popularity of mobile phones in general have raised the expectations of Internet businesses in Japan. One third of Japan's 126 million people carry mobile phones--and therefore are potential i-mode customers. By comparison, only about 17 million people currently log on to the Internet, according to the Ministry of Posts and Communications. But, of those, only 2 million-3 million people are surfing the Net for personal use.
Enter the ubiquitous mobile phone. Turn the millions of phones that Japanese carry into on-line terminals and the prospects for Net business are staggering. As Kei-ichi Enoki, director DoCoMo's i-mode department explains, the belated Internet revolution in Japan will start from these handy gadgets rather than desktop computers. "Cellular phones offer a bigger consumer market than the regular Internet," Enoki says. "The most attractive thing about cellular phones is that people carry them around all the time. It's almost like a part of your body."
The i-mode service is easy to use: Press the button marked "i" and you are connected to an Internet menu within 10 seconds. It's also relatively inexpensive. DoCoMo users pay a standard monthly charge of Yen300 ($2.60), although the special phones themselves cost between Yen10,000 and Yen35,000. Transmission charges for connecting sites is calculated on the volume of data sent and received, not on air time. Checking the balance on a bank account, for instance, would cost Yen10-20 while transferring funds could cost Yen40. IDO and DDI, in contrast, charge by air time--Yen10 a minute for the IDO service and Yen10 for 30 seconds for DDI. In general, though, users can expect to pay an average Yen2,000 a month, a huge savings over the average monthly fee of Yen12,500 for access to the Internet through a desktop computer.
DoCoMo now has 116 sites linked to its i-mode menu page. But there are also 10 times as many Web sites that aren't listed but can be reached if users type the address into their phones. The extra effort involved means that such sites are visited less, acknowledges Shohei Horiguchi, the owner of Yamanakako Pension Cello, an inn in Yamanashi prefecture, west of Tokyo. "People play with their portable phones and that's how some people find our place," says Horiguchi, whose i-mode site offers reservation and transportation information, but isn't linked to DoCoMo's menu.
Corporations, too, are realizing that mobile phones are an easy access tool for the Internet, particularly in a country where use of personal computers, and therefore the Net, is low compared to America and Europe. Ajinomoto, Japan's largest seasoning company, for example, has started offering cooking recipes for i-mode users to help them decide on a dinner menu or check what ingredients to buy at the store.
And there's another reason i-mode services have become attractive to many companies. I-mode is written in HTML, or Web-site language, so information providers can use their existing Internet text. Take Nippon Telemedia Service, an affiliate company of a major daily newspaper, Yomiuri Shimbun. The company provides general and sports news by slightly altering the news stories on the Yomiuri's Web site. To enable the information to fit onto the phone's tiny screen, there are, of course, limits. News stories can be no more than 50 letters and no pictures can be used. Yet, they still do the job, says Tsuneo Tobe, a spokesman for Nippon Telemedia. "It's like bullet news. You don't get to see full text but you get the basics," says Tobe.
The "basics" are quite enough for i-mode addict Tanaka--provided that by scrolling forward his machine he can get all his football results.
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