Willcom

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WILLCOM (ウィルコム) is a Japanese PHS operator, offering flat-rate wireless network data transmission and flat-rate voice calls for its subscribers.

The company was formerly known as DDI Pocket, a subsidiary of KDDI. In 2004, the Carlyle Group acquired a majority stake from KDDI and changed the name of the company in February 2005.

1 Overview
2 History
3 Stock holders
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Overview

WILLCOM, Inc. is a telecommunications company operating a PHS network covering almost all over Japan, and has the largest share of Japanese PHS market. Other PHS operators withdrawing their services, it is bound to become the only remaining PHS operator.

It crossed the 4 million subscribers mark on May 29, 2006.

WILLCOM Okinawa Co., Ltd. is a subsidiary for operations in Okinawa.

[edit] History

The company was founded as a planning-company in 1994, and started to offer telephony services in 1995 (DDI-Pocket). As an operator, it has mainly base stations of 500mW-radio output (and sensitivity), unlike other PHS operators, which had mainly built 20mW base stations.

The high output level caused some radio interference and it was difficult to place calls in dense areas such as Shinjuku, Tokyo at the early times of the activity, although these problems were solved afterwards. On the other hand, high output (and sensitivity) can also earn wider coverage of area per base station, therefore the operator was able to expand its coverage faster. A tough competition emerged against the cellular telephony companies, and until October 1996, it was not possible to make call between PHS and cellular telephones. Afterwards, charges between the two different systems remained high.

PHS was first popular because of its lower cost, but cellular telephone companies also reduced the charge, which was too expensive from the beginning. Furthermore, the coverage of the cellular companies quickly expanded to comparable levels The competitive advantage of PHS reduced, and DDI Pocket went through difficult years at the end of the 90s and beginning of 2000s, before the launch of its flat-rate service and its buyout by Carlisle.