The cooperation between three of the world’s most advanced and influential cellcos continues to deepen, with NTT Docomo of Japan, China Mobile and Korea Telecom expanding their business collaboration. The three companies, all of which are frontrunners in areas like Cloud-RAN, HetNet and new applications, have extended the timeframe for their alliance, originally announced in early 2011, until January 2017, and have also widened its scope.
The extension paves the way for the accelerated deployment of international LTE roaming services in China, Japan and Korea, which started with the launch, this week of KT’s data roaming service for subscribers using Docomo’s network while visiting Japan.
Other ongoing areas of collaboration between the three operators include the development of
common specifications for international NFC roaming services, to support mobile payments for travellers; laying out a cross-border scheme for Wi-Fi roaming services in the three countries; and providing Japanese mobile content for China Mobile’s portal, Mobile Market, and for KT’s Olleh Market portal.
The trio’s’broad-based business tie-up’ was originally set up to focus on smartphone platforms and commercial opportunities, allowing for cross-border services and also increasing the players’ negotiating weight in procurement and other activities. As well as roaming and smartphone buying, other key target areas in the coming years will be enterprise services, LTE enhancement, and common apps frameworks.
The carriers are also keen to tap into each other’s ideas on user experience, part of the constant quest to produce an operator controlled platform with greater consumer appeal than those of Google or Apple. Docomo is the operator with the heritage here, having been a major innovator in the mobile web and user interface, and the creator of an international initiative around its i-Mode system, before that got superseded by more modern and open approaches.
Docomo and KT had a roaming deal before 2011, and the Japanese giant has a 5% stake in its Korean counterpart.