"The fact is, we will be the first to introduce 3G services this May," said Kouji Ohboshi, chairman at NTT DoCoMo, Japan's biggest company by market value and operator of the popular i-mode mobile Internet access service.

DoCoMo is set to begin broadband mobile phone services capable of delivering video, CD-quality sound and fast Net access from late May using the W-CDMA standard, which it developed and is promoting for use by its overseas partners.

But Qualcomm Inc chief executive Irwin Jacobs said last week, in an interview with the Financial Times, that European mobile phone operators currently developing systems on the W-CDMA standard were unlikely to launch them until next year and not in volume until late 2004 or early 2005.

San Diego-based Qualcomm is instead promoting the use of cdma2000, a competing standard which it says is better and will appear in Korea, Japan and the United States later this year.

"It's meaningless for both of us to debate which standard is better when we haven't even started the service," said Ohboshi, who was DoCoMo's first president when it emerged as an independent unit of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT) in 1992.

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