NTT DoCoMo spending $5.3B on LTE in 2015

NTT DoCoMo looks to Premium 4G offering

Japanese mobile telephony operator NTT DoCoMo said it expects to invest a total of $5.3 billion during its fiscal year 2015, ending March 31, 2016.

During fiscal year 2014, the operator had invested a total of $5.56 billion, down 41.4% vs. the previous fiscal year.

“We’re working to enhance the coverage and the speed of [the] LTE network, and we’re also working hard to improve efficiency,” NTT DoCoMo’s President and CEO Kaoru Kato said during a conference call with investors.

Kato said that the operator ended March with a total of 97,400 LTE base stations across Japan, up compared to 55,300 base stations the previous year.

Kato highlighted that 57,700 LTE base stations currently support download speeds of 100Mbps or higher.

At the end of fiscal year 2014, only 3,500 base stations enabled high-speed LTE service.

NTT DoCoMo has recently launched its 225 Mbps LTE service dubbed ‘Premium 4G’ and aims to offer an even faster service in the medium term.

“We want to offer faster speed, and we will deliver a 300 Mbps LTE service during fiscal year 2015,” Kato said.

According to a company presentation, NTT DoCoMo expects to launch a 370 Mbps LTE service through spectrum in the 3.5 GHz band during fiscal year 2016.

“We are aiming for introduction of 5G by around 2020. So therefore, we will promote further faster speed, and we aim to offer the fastest network speed here in Japan,” Kato added.

NTT DoCoMo ended fiscal year 2014 with more than 30 million 4G LTE subscribers and targets 37 million subscribers by the end of fiscal 2015.