DoCoMo USA Labs: Corporate Profile /Research & Development / YRP

The mobile communications market has major potential to grow over the medium to long-term as well. DoCoMo intends to pursue new and extremely promising growth by providing total business solutions that can respond to diverse user demands, especially demand for "multimedia" and "ubiquity."

FOMA applications still have tremendous room for expansion. We are aggressively working to generate demand with medium to long-term business opportunities in mind.

We continue to make efforts to develop our technology and handsets in the third generation (3G). In addition, based on our R&D capabilities, we have also embarked on fourth-generation (4G) research and development.

Making it possible to turn user demands into reality depends, of course, on research and development capabilities. DoCoMo is engaged in basic research and development of advanced technology under a trilateral arrangement that brings together our research and development center in Japan (Yokosuka Research Park, Kanagawa Prefecture), which is our main laboratory, which DoCoMo USA Labs in the U.S. (Silicon Valley), DoCoMo Euro-Labs in Europe (Munich, Germany) and DoCoMo Beijing Labs in China (Beijing, China).

Our development activities contain three priorities. The first priority is the development of handsets. We focus on increasing performance by, for example, making smaller and lighter handsets, lengthening standby times as well as improving functions to implement new services, such as online payments. The second priority is network technology. We are involved in development that will service to help construct an IP-based network that can respond to increasing data traffic in a multimedia society and decreasing network costs. The third priority is wireless technology. We have been working on the development of low cost base stations to expand FOMA service areas. We are also engaged in the development of HSDPA*, which enables faster communication (the maximum transmission speed is approximately 14Mbps) and better transmission efficiency than the current FOMA. Furthermore, in the field of basic research, we have already begun research on a fourth generation (4G) communications system (offering a transmission speed of up to 100Mbps). We have already had success with indoor transmissions tests conducted in October 2002, and have begun outdoor experiments in the current fiscal year. Also, we are conducting basic research into discovering new communication methods suited to the ubiquitous communications society we envision. We are proud of two of DoCoMo's most outstanding features; an industry-leading R&D organization and strong development capabilities.

*HSDPA stands for High Speed Downlink Packet Access. It is a W-CDMA technology to accelerate 3G downstream packet data transmission.

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