Wednesday, February 27, 2002
Interesting article on the register regarding NTT DoCoMo's ever expanding rollout of 3G service in Japan. The "NTT" part, by the way, stands for "Nippon Telephone & Telegraph", which just so happens to be Japan's monopoly phone provider. That monopoly, like AT&T of old, was built through government protection and regulation. Instead of applying the chainsaw to NTT, however, Japan chose to remove many of the state-mandated market protections enjoyed by NTT and let the market sort things out (the same applies to the Korean market, by they way, leading to that country having the largest market for broadband internet access in the world). The result was that NTT was free to rely on revenue from it's land line phone business to build a Japanese wireless infrastructure.
NTT DoCoMo is still 67% owned by NTT, yet they are showing the world how to do wireless internet right (through it's i-Mode). I-Mode's popularity creates the incentive to upgrade rapidly to 3G (essentially, broadband wireless internet access), and not surprisingly, NTT DoCoMo is doing just that.
Sometimes it is better to let markets figure things out.
NTT DoCoMo is still 67% owned by NTT, yet they are showing the world how to do wireless internet right (through it's i-Mode). I-Mode's popularity creates the incentive to upgrade rapidly to 3G (essentially, broadband wireless internet access), and not surprisingly, NTT DoCoMo is doing just that.
Sometimes it is better to let markets figure things out.
