Mobile phone company J-Phone Co. said Friday it will start a third-generation mobile phone service June 30.
The company, owned by Britain's Vodafone Group PLC, will launch the service in Tokyo's 23 wards, Yokohama and Kawasaki, J-Phone President Darryl Green said. The service is to be available nationwide by the end of 2004.
J-Phone plans to introduce new high-speed mobile phones before the service goes nationwide, he said. The company also hopes to start a service enabling the transmission of video taken by built-in cameras as early as February, he added.
The cell phone market has been growing by around 9 million handsets annually, according to Green, but it is likely to shrink to 5 million to 6 million this year.
He said J-Phone will focus on investment in next-generation phones, indicating that capital investment in fiscal 2001 will be cut to around 300 billion yen from the initially planned 600 billion yen.
The start of the new J-Phone service will mark the beginning of 3G competition in the country.
On Oct. 1, NTT DoCoMo Inc. launched a 3G service in the Tokyo metropolitan area named FOMA, an acronym for freedom of mobile multimedia access.
There were 27,000 subscribers as of the end of December.
On April 1, KDDI Corp. will start a new upgraded mobile phone service dubbed CDMA 2000 1X.