By contrast, NTTDoCoMo is putting its money firmly behind mobile data. Its investment plans in Japan provide capacity for huge amounts of data transmission. Three years from now, NTTDoCoMo will have invested, it says, 1 trillion yen (10bn Euros, if our maths is correct) in obtaining 6 million 3G customers. This investment, it says, will be enough to handle over 15m subscribers and provide coverage of 97% of the population. The major services it mentions as needing 3G bandwidth are music downloads and 'image clipping'.
Oftel appears to believe that such an arrangement would be acceptable if it 'allowed the delivery of 3G services earlier and at lower prices' than would otherwise be the case. It notes that the 3G licences do not ‘a priori exclude infrastructure sharing’ and that some forms of sharing, e.g. masts, are positively encouraged.
The Orange Prospectus
We have forecast that the increase in the number of users during the whole of 2001 will be as follows