NEW DELHI, India—The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has slashed airtime tariffs on roaming for cellular phones by 70 percent and has fixed a ceiling of 3 rupees (US$0.06) per minute for roaming. At present, the ceiling on roaming charges is 10 rupees...
HAMAMATSU CITY, SHIZOUKA, Japan—Yamaha Corp. announced it will begin providing a polyphonic cellular phone ring tone download service for Spain's Telefonica Moviles at the end of February.Yamaha said the service will offer 500 ring tones, mainly tunes from Spain, the United States and the...
TOKYO—NEC, a leading telecom vender in Japan, started a sample shipment of a 64-Megabit Random Access Memory (RAM) device for cellular phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). NEC has been providing a 32-Megabit RAM for cellular phones and PDAs.To meet the new demand for...
TOKYO—Kyocera, a leading telecom vender in Japan, and Hanaro Telecom, a leading carrier in Korea, reached an agreement regarding the next-generation high-speed mobile data business, Kyocera announced on 22 January. Based on the agreement, Hanaro plans to launch a high-speed mobile Internet service in...
TOKYO—DDI Pocket, Japan's largest PHS operator, is going to launch a 128 kilobits per second (kbps) data transmission service on 26 March, the carrier announced on 17 January.DDI Pocket, the PHS business unit of KDDI, is currently providing a 32 kbps data service with...
MANILA, Philippines—The adoption of wireless data applications and services among Asian mobile-phone users has to rise in order for the wireless industry to fully take off in the region, according to Peter Cohan, a high-tech management consultant in the region and author of technology...
CARROLLTON, Texas, United States—G-Tel Wireless said Taiwan handset maker Senao will distribute G-Tel's shielding phone case and antenna cap to all customer who purchase a Senao cellular phone "as a precaution against cell-phone radiation."Most companies in the mobile-phone industry have denied a correlation between...
NEW DELHI, India—Seven leading cellular service providers—covering about 80 percent of India's 5 million cellular subscribers—have slashed mobile-to-mobile long-distance telephony rates to one-half the current rates beginning 26 January, 2002.The move was in response to deep discounts offered by the newly launched national long-distance...
TOKYO—Sanyo Electric, a leading electronics manufacturer in Japan, and Eastman Kodak Company, on 4 December announced they will set up a joint venture for developing an organic light emitting diode (OLEC) on 21 December. The OLEC is winning much attention in the market as...
TOKYO-NTT DoCoMo, the leading mobile carrier in Japan, on 1 October launched the world's first third-generation (3G) mobile service in the Tokyo metropolitan area, receiving mixed reviews from market analysts. The visual phone, one of three 3G terminals, with a small camera and a...
STAMFORD, Connecticut, United States—Respondents in a study conducted by Gartner said an average of 49.5 percent of their cellular phone calls are placed from a car while driving, although this number has decreased during the past few years as handheld phones have become more...
SAN JOSE, Calif.—Fujitsu Microelectronics America has introduced what it calls the industry's smallest, low-power camera module for cellular phones and personal digital assistants."It has the lowest power requirement of any CIF-CMOS sensor, with a consumption of just 30mW at 15 frames/second," said the company...
HELSINKI, Finland—Nokia began shipping its General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) phones in Europe on 28 September, barely making the third-quarter deadline it had set for itself for commercially offering GPRS handsets. Competing handset vendors Motorola and Ericsson already have several GPRS models on the...
HELSINKI, Finland—Nokia began shipping its GPRS phones in Europe on Sept. 28, barely making the third-quarter deadline it had set for itself for commercially offering GPRS handsets. Competing handset vendors Motorola and Ericsson already have several GPRS models on the European market.According to international...
IRVINE, Calif.—Toshiba Corp. said it has introduced a family of chips it calls Silicon Germanium Heterojunction Bipolar Transistor for cellular phones and other wireless devices with wideband CDMA and wireless local area network functionality."Today's high-end portable and wireless communications devices are driving the need...
MIAMI—Miami-Dade County is the latest municipality to enact a ban on the use of cellular phones while driving following the county commission's adoption of an ordinance banning the act unless a hands-free device is used. The ordinance is scheduled to go into effect October...
FRAMINGHAM, Massachusetts, United States—NMS Communications said the Philippines' IdeaWurx selected its technology to power a short message service (SMS) technology used by Globe Telecom and Philippine Long Distance Telephone Company (PLDT).IdeaWurx's technology allows messages to be created via voice prompts over the telephone and...
BEIJING, China-China's state Development Planning Commission said it has approved 19 firms to make CDMA handsets to cater to part of its 120.6 million cellular phone subscribers.Some of the approved companies include Ningo Bird, China Kejian Co., Zhongxing telecom and TCL Group.
A U.S. federal appeals court rejected a Federal Communications Commission filing asking that it not be required to return personal communications services licenses to bankrupt carrier NextWave Telecom Inc. NextWave, however, will probably not gain control of the licenses for some time and the...
BEIJING, China—China's state Development Planning Commission said it has approved 19 firms to make CDMA handsets to cater to part of its 120.6 million cellular phone subscribers.Some of the approved companies include Ningo Bird, China Kejian Co., Zhongxing telecom and TCL Group.
BUENOS AIRES, Argentina—The communications secretariat and cellular operators announced that on 1 September, after dealing with the inconveniences that had forced the delay of its implementation last May, total calling party pays (CPP) would begin to apply for cellular users.CPP has been in use...
WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission issued a notice of proposed rule making to ICO Global Communications regarding its request that mobile satellite service operators in the 2 GHz band be allowed to re-use their assigned frequencies for ancillary terrestrial services.ICO said the outcome of this...
TOKYO—About 41 percent of seniors in their 60s in Japan have their own cellular phones, and 35 percent started using their cellular phone within the past year, according to a survey conducted by NTT DoCoMo. According to the survey of 300 people in their...
