Japan looks to future mobile telecoms utopia

Andi Haswidi, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Apart from providing more convenience and efficiency in communication, mobile telecommunications will also play a significant role in the future of education and healthcare, a Japanese telecoms expert says.

Hitoshi Yoshino, a senior executive of NTT DoCoMo, Japan's largest mobile telecoms operator, said Thursday during a Japanese government-sponsored seminar in Jakarta that the advancement of mobile technology had begun to change the way the people supplied medical services and education.

In the future, he said, mobile telecommunication technology would enhance human to human, human to machine and machine to machine communications.

"As we can see from the video, an advanced application, among other things, would allow a veterinarian to examine a sick horse remotely from his car through holographic images and virtual telephony," Hitoshi said during a video presentation.

Such a scenario, Hitoshi said, would require a broadband data transfer capability in the range of 500 megabytes to 3 gigabytes per second. The most widely used broadband wireless data transfer system at the present time has a capability of 384 kilobytes per second.

The video show highlighted some of the possibilities offered by the fourth-generation mobile technology (4G) known as International Mobile Technology (IMT)-Advanced, which represents the next stage of development of NTT DoCoMo's current third-generation (3G) mobile technology, known as Freedom Of Multimedia Access (FOMA), or IMT-2000. Other potentials included platforms for mobile remote learning systems, urban area monitoring with a personal uplink system, mobile botanical laboratories, one-stop travel boarding system, and integration of information technology with transportation access.

The video also highlighted how a disabled teacher could converse and interact closely with students during a pottery class using a virtual telephony system with images projected vividly on what appeared to be an ordinary "big window" glasses.

Japan raced ahead of other developed countries when launching it launched the world's first 3G technology with the rollout of NTT DoCoMo's FOMA in 2001.

NTT DoCoMo is a subsidiary of Japan's incumbent telephone operator NTT, while the name DoCoMo is officially an abbreviation of the phrase Do Communications Over the Mobile Network. It also means "everywhere" in Japanese.

Since FOMA was the first 3G technology to penetrate the market, it uses a similar, but nevertheless different, kind of 3G technology to the Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS), which was first adopted by Europe and later became the most widely used in the world.

Hitoshi said that to ensure the further development of FOMA, global harmonization of frequency spectrum bands had to occur so as to ensure economies of scale and permit global roaming.

"Globally harmonized bands are needed for both coverage bands and capacity bands," he stressed.