If you look at a list of nations supporting commercial Global System for Mobile communications networks, Japan is conspicuously absent from the list.
Its neighbor, China, has numerous GSM systems, as do several countries in Southeast Asia. Korea is valiantly testing the U.S.-developed standard, Code Division Multiple Access.
But through the years, Japan has gone its own way, standards-wise, and subscriber growth has been enormous. So enormous that the island nation is faced with an unexpected capacity crunch.
Japan is the largest mobile communications market in the Asia-Pacific region. Japan’s cellular carriers added two million subscribers in 1994, bringing the total number of users to 4 million. The subscriber count is expected to rise to 8 million by year’s end, meaning the Japanese will run out of capacity by 1998, instead of 2000.
Concern about this has provoked Japanese carriers to consider deploying CDMA technology alongside their Personal Digital Communications networks to give them enough capacity to operate effectively until the international community completes its work on a worldwide digital standard.
The International Telecommunications Union in Geneva is hosting a meeting in October for countries involved in discussions about the Future Public Land Mobile Telephone Service.
But expressing interest in CDMA doesn’t mean there will be a sale. No definitive contracts for CDMA have been announced, although interest has been expressed by operators IDO and DDI.
“They still have some very good options with PDC,” said Gene Delaney, vice president and general manager of the Japan Cellular Infrastructure Division of Motorola Inc.
PDC provides users with three times the capacity of analog, and Japanese carriers are in the early phases of pumping up those systems with “half-rate PDC,” Delaney said.
Japanese carriers offer analog, a Japanese version of Total Access Communication Service, PDC and Personal Handyphone System service.
The nation also is home to prominent equipment manufacturers such as NEC Corp. While the Japan-based manufacturers of radio equipment build to numerous worldwide standards for global markets, they tend to export some of their country’s unique technology as well.
For instance, NEC Corp. has strong influence in South America; it has been a major telecommunications supplier in Guatemala for 25 years. Consequently, it was able to sell the national carrier there a wireless local loop system based on Japan’s PHS technology. NEC sold the same system in Argentina, where NEC has been in business for nearly 30 years.
But if CDMA is adopted by Japanese carriers, it’s uncertain whether the nation’s manufacturers will build to the standard and export to countries over which it has influence.
But historically, the Japanese “have been good about taking care of the home shop first,” Delaney adds, which means a continuing study of CDMA, aggressive migration off the analog networks and the allocation of more spectrum by the government.
