SINGAPORE-Four years after it was first introduced in Japan, PHS technology finally has made some headway in the international telecommunications arena. Taiwanese paging operator First International Telecom (Fitel) recently was awarded a license to operate PHS service in Taiwan.
Ching-Chich Lin, director of the radiowave regulatory department at Taiwan’s Directorate General of Telecommunications, told Global Wireless that Fitel had been awarded a “low-tier license” to offer PHS services.
“We estimate Fitel will take about half a year to build [out the initial] construction before starting operations,” Lin said.
Fitel’s decision to introduce PHS services to the country’s 20 million people marks a turning point in the history of PHS.
Introduced in July 1995 as a low-mobility, high-quality public access communications system, PHS was supposed to have taken the world by storm. And for a while, it looked as if it would indeed. In just two years of operation, the PHS subscriber base in Japan grew to 7 million, leading to industry expectations that the rest of the world would soon adopt the system.
But then subscriber growth slowed as carriers encountered coverage and capacity problems and as they discontinued aggressive promotional programs.
Meanwhile, carriers in many countries throughout Europe and Asia were promoting heavily cellular phones based on the GSM standard. Cell phone manufacturers dropped their prices, and more and more countries started to adopt GSM.
PHS got a minor boost in June 1998 when China’s Postal and Telecommunications Authority awarded NEC a contract to supply 600 PHS handsets to the Great Hall of the People, on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. The handsets, along with 200 radio antennas and a switchboard, were to be used to establish a wireless phone network in and around the Great Hall.
However, nationwide adoption of the PHS system in China has yet to take place, and analysts wonder if it ever will.
PHS has not had much success elsewhere in Asia. Singapore and Hong Kong, for example, conducted short PHS trials a few years ago, but both decided against implementing commercial service.
Malaysia, Thailand and even Indonesia also had toyed with the idea of commercializing the service, but plans fell through during the Asian economic meltdown that began in 1997.
Steven Yeong, an analyst for the Gartner Group in Singapore, said many wireless operators are moving to third-generation (3G) systems via the GSM or CDMA routes.
“There is clearer support for both of these systems in terms of moving [to] 2.5G and eventually 3G,” he said. “PHS falls outside of this. Infrastructure-wise and in terms of cost-benefit analysis, (carriers believe it’s) much better to upgrade their present GSM and CDMA systems.”
But with Taiwan’s decision to introduce PHS, things finally could be looking up for the technology.
Citing the standard’s suitability for urban environments and high data speeds, Fitel has decided to roll out PHS first in the country’s densely populated capital, Taipei, and then in Taichung and Kaohsiung, two large cities south of Taipei.
PHS, which has a shorter range than conventional cellular systems, is suited to Taiwan’s high population density. Other benefits are that PHS handsets are cheaper and have a longer battery life than other wireless technologies.
Perhaps what clinched the deal was that Japanese manufacturers, including Mitsubishi, NEC, Panasonic and Sony, want to introduce high-speed data transmission over PHS very soon-sooner than data could be added to rival technologies.
PHS networks already offer 32 kilobit-per-second (kbps) data transmission, which is far ahead of the 9.6 kbps that traditional cellular networks are able to support. In addition, NTT and five other Japanese companies currently are testing technology they say will offer upward of 25 Megabits per second.
