DoCoMo to come to UK

1 December 2004 20:40 GMT / By Stuart Miles

No sooner than we've all got used to the idea of 3G services in the UK, mm02 has teamed up with NTT DoCoMo to allow 02 to launch the I-mode internet service in Britain, Germany and Ireland.

DoCoMo and mmO2 said the service in Britain and Ireland would start in the second half of 2005 and a similar service under the mmO2 brand will begin in Germany in the following year.

The i-mode service was developed by DoCoMo in Japan and gives users email, ring tones, web access and games. In Japan about 90% of DoCoMo's customers use its i-mode technology accessing more than 70,000 mobile websites. The success is main attributable to users not needing to remember long winded web addresses to access the information or having to worry about setting up an email address as phones are pre programmed.

This is not the first time that NTT DoCoMo has been apart of the UK market. It failed to sell the idea to then partner Hutchison Whampoa's 3.
Under the Japanese model, subscribers are charged for the service based on the volume of data transmitted.

Full tags

Phones, Mobile phones, O2