According to a paper, if NTT DoCoMo delays the October launch of its FOMA service, it will still puts the carrier at least a year ahead of the rest of the world.

Ericsson CEO Kurt Hellstrom, said in his keynote for the MobileCommAsia conference on Thursday, that volume shipment of GPRS handsets would not happen until the end of this year, putting the arrival of 3G deeper into the future.

“By the end of this year, we will see eight vendors shipping GPRS handsets in volume,” Hellstrom said.

Yet his comments come at a time when the industry is starting to admit its shortcomings. One senior executive said: “It was a combined mistake by everybody. We underestimated the limits of the specifications for GPRS and how they can be implemented.”

3G will only prove that much more difficult, speculates Hugh Brogan, chief executive officer at mobile phone maker Sendo. GPRS is just an incremental step to today’s networks while 3G represents a completely new technology leap, hence many times more complex, Brogan points out.

Three weeks after it launched a limited trial service in the Tokyo area, NTT DoCoMo is also experiencing growing pains, but nothing that the operator cannot handle, insists Kyoji Murakami, senior manager, IMT-2000 network office at NTT DoCoMo’s network division.

One problem is the software that controls the soft handover between different base stations on the network.

“A handset has to talk to multiple base stations, and the handover becomes very complex,” he said. However, he expects the problem to be solved in time for the October launch. “The software is not perfect, but it is not bad.”

NTT DoCoMo has about 3,000 monitors, or trial users, on the FOMA service. Initial reaction from the users have been mixed. Users like the faster speed, but some have complained about coverage holes, Murakami said.

The focus of FOMA will be the introduction of multimedia services, Murakami said. “With 3G, we will get up to 384 kbps. Our i-mode service today has only 9.6 kbps. That means we will get 40 times the speed,” he adds. “The added speed will enable three times the number of applications.”

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last updated: January 12, 2004

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