Japan now has 100 million mobile subscribers

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 08 February 2007 18:04

IT Industry - Strategy

Figures released by Japan's Telecommunications Carriers Association put the number of mobile subscribers at 31 January at just over 100 million.

True cellular devices are a tad short of the 100 million mark, at 95.3 million: the balance is made up of personal handyphone system devices (PHS).  The number indicates a penetration level of around 78 percent.

NTT DoCoMo had the largest market share, 52.2 million, followed by KDDI with 27.4 million. Softbank Mobile (formerly Vodafone Japan) had 15.7 million.

PDC (Japan's 2G system) had 29.4 million subscribers across NTT DoCoMo,  KDDI's TU-KA and Softbank networks.  KDDI's CDMA2000 1x  'au' network had 25.6 million subscriber. NTT DoCoMo had 33.1 million subscribers on its WCDMA 'FOMA' network and Softbank 6.6 million.

NTT DoCoMo's iMode information service had 47.2 million customers, KDDI's EXWeb 22.7 million and Softbank's Yahoo!keitai 13.0 million.