OPERATOR PROFILE
NTT DOCOMO 6 TMNQUARTERLY
The new of today, the norm of tomorrow. It’s not the most rousing of slogans, but in some respects NTT does indeed seem to be delivering tomorrow’s network today. Remember iMode? How it was going to be the data networking protocol of the future? Remember where that started? Yep – NTT DoCoMo. Remember FOMA? The 3G network standard that wasn’t compatible with any of the other 3G network standards, but that NTT DoCoMo still has in operation? Well both are still going strong underpinning 2G and 3G data services in Japan, even though the rest of the world looked on and shrugged. Just these names alone are enough to remind us that NTT DoCoMo is not afraid to innovate on its own when it comes to network technology. With up to 50% mobile market share, and until very recently fierce control of its handset suppliers, if it wanted to make something happen it had the scale and muscle to do
so. But can recent efforts make more of an impact in the rest of the world? Recently DoCoMo has aligned itself more closely with global standards. Its Xi service is based on LTE, and its Premium 4G service provides enhanced speeds reliant on its deployment of LTE-A in the network. Not that the vendor isn’t still willing to tweak and modify standards to meet its own specific use cases. For example, the carrier has developed its own network densification technology that exploits Carrier Aggregation to allow “significantly improved data capacity and throughput” in high traffic areas. The operator calls the architecture advanced C-RAN (Centralised RAN) and is deploying it as it introduces LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) features into its network.