Vodafone JapanVodafone K.K. (ボーダフォン株式会社), also known as Vodafone Japan, is the Japanese branch of mobile phone operator Vodafone.
TechnologyVodafone Japan currently operates both PDC (Japanese 2G) and W-CDMA (UMTS 3G) networks. Unlike NTT DoCoMo's competing W-CDMA network FOMA, J-Phone is compatible with UMTS and supports transparent global roaming for existing UMTS (and even GSM) customers. HistoryThe company was originally founded in 1991 as the mobile phone division of Japan Telecom under the name Digital Phone (デジタルホン). J-Phone Co., Ltd. (J-フォン) was formed in 1999 by the merging of Digital Phone Group (DPG, 3 local companies) and Digital TU-KA Group (DTG, 6 local companies, not to be confused with TU-KA). Japan Telecom owned a stake of 45.1%. In October 2001, the British mobile phone group Vodafone increased its share to 66.7% of Japan Telecom and 69.7% of J-Phone. On October 1, 2003 the brand was officially changed to Vodafone. ServicesVodafone Japan has been growing steadily for a decade by continuously introducing new services and enhancements such as SkyWalker SMS for PDC, SkyMelody ringtone download, the famous Sha-Mail picture mail, and advanced Java services powered by JSCL. Vodafone Japan is shifting its wireless data services from the proprietary J-Sky to the open standard WAP platform but it is likely to remain different from other Vodafone Live! services abroad while new services and improvements are constantly being added to compete in the Japanese market. Vodafone Japan's 3G UMTS service, the Vodafone Global Standard (VGS), is performing even worse than DoCoMo's FOMA service. VGS has not acquired many subscribers because the lack of full range of wireless data services. As of end December 2003, Vodafone Japan has 14.774 million customers, among which 111,700 are VGS subscribers and 12.771 million are Vodafone live! users. Timeline1991-07: Tokyo Digital Phone established ja:ボーダフォン |
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