DoCoMo USA Labs: Mission / CEO's Message

NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s premier mobile communication company, provides wireless voice and data communications to nearly 50 million customers in Japan. The competition amongst mobile carriers in the Japanese cellular market is expected to be intensified even further in the future due to the introduction of mobile number portability and the new entrants to the cellular market, and saturating market due to the rapid increases of the market penetration rate and the diversification of customer demands. To compete against this backdrop, NTT DoCoMo is seeking to reinforce its core business by taking comprehensive measures in an effort to react swiftly and adequately to the diverse needs of customers from a “customer-centric” perspective under the corporate philosophy of “creating a new world of communications culture”. Furthermore, in pursuit of transforming our cellular handsets into a multifunctional tool for everyday life and business, we intend to evolve our cellular service by equipping the handsets with electronic money, credit card payment and other attractive features.

In November 1999, NTT DoCoMo founded DoCoMo Communication Laboratories USA (DoCoMo USA Labs) in San Jose, California, and five years have past since then. During these five years, Internet connection from cellular phone (i-modeTM in NTT DoCoMo), data communications, and multimedia services such as video telephony have become important part of our business in addition to conventional voice services. In parallel with this change of the business environment, mobile network infrastructure was also migrating from circuit switched network to packet switched network, and mobile devices have been evolving to require the similar functionalities of PCs. New radio access technologies such as HSDPA, Super 3G and Beyond 3G that further broaden the bandwidth are also in a pipeline and start coming soon. All of them combined are leading the cellular network to be ALL-IP Giga-bit capable broadband network. Besides the cellular networks, WiFi-based network services or VoIP services have become popular, and study about the convergence of all these networks and services, or Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC), have started widely. As this shows, environment around mobile communications is keep evolving, and this trend will continue further. At the same time, mobile terminals and basic functions of the network such as voice services will be commoditized further. Under these circumstances, the mission of US Labs is to develop key technologies for differentiated services in low cost, with mid-term strategic vision developed by top-tier research experts. This is my foundation as a CEO of the labs.

DoCoMo USA Labs have been making significant contributions in three research areas; mobile network, mobile terminal software and media coding. All of them are the key technologies that are important and essential to realize to provide innovative, attractive and secure services for customers at reasonable cost. In the United States, especially in Silicon Valley, there are the world leaders in Internet technologies and software applications technologies with the power of new business creation. Exploring the synergy benefits through collaboration with those companies in the US is the part of our activities. I look forward to creating highly innovative and disruptive technologies lead to new life styles, and contributing to the growth of NTT DoCoMo and whole mobile industry.

Eisuke Miki
President and Chief Executive Officer