US : The CDMA Development Group congratulated KDDI on consistently gaining the most net subscribers in Japan during every month for the past year, since July 2005. In July 2006, KDDI added 303,100 subscribers to its network, bringing its total number of customers to about 23.9 million. In this category, KDDI continues to outperform its competition in the region by a large margin. Migrating their second-generation PDC and cdmaOneTM subscribers to third-generation (3G) CDMA2000 1X, and later upgrading them to CDMA2000 1xEV-DO (WIN), is one reason for KDDI’s success.

In addition, KDDI’s overall average revenue per user (ARPU) for data services increased to $17.00 USD (¥1970) from $15.60 USD (¥1810) over the past 12 months. This number purely represents the revenue from packet data and does not include contribution from SMS which is counted in voice ARPU. The highest contributors to KDDI’s data ARPU came from its 1xEV-DO subscribers who sustained an impressive data ARPU of $30.10 USD (¥3490) over the past year. KDDI’s overall data ARPU now represents 30% of its total ARPU of $58.70 USD (¥6810) per month. This is an important leading indicator when considering the erosion of voice ARPU that is being experienced by most operators worldwide.

“The CDG is pleased to see such a strong market response to KDDI’s CDMA2000 1xEV-DO service,” said Perry LaForge, executive director of the CDG. “Japan has a highly discerning market of seasoned technophiles, and their choice of services has significant importance for the telecommunications industry.”

Dr. Hideo Okinaka, vice president and general manager, Technical Standards and Spectrum Division of KDDI commented, “The success of our EV-DO network is indicative of the growing demand for 3G services and applications. CDMA continues to outperform our competition and our continued increase in data users and revenues prove that reality. With our introduction of Rev A, we will continue to capture market share with the availability of new and optimized data applications.”

KDDI will invest $1.73 billion over the next three years to upgrade its nationwide network to CDMA2000 1x EV-DO Revision (Rev A) technology and will begin deploying Rev A advanced broadband services by December 2006. The launch will further strengthen its competitive position following the availability of number portability in October 2006. Rev A is an evolutionary enhancement to 1xEV-DO Release 0, optimized for mobile broadband packet data services, supporting peak download speeds of up to 3.1 Mbps and upload speeds up to 1.8 Mbps. Rev A also reduces system latencies well below 40 milliseconds to support symmetric, delay-sensitive applications such as carrier-grade voice over internet protocol (VoIP), high-performance video telephony, push-to-talk, push-to-media, and real-time multiplayer online gaming.

CDMA2000 consistently proves to be the most economical and flexible solution for next generation services — capable of affordably delivering the Voice/Video/Data “triple-play” and enabling the convergence of telecommunications with entertainment, consumer electronics and information technology. Aside from its time-to-market lead in delivering 3G services, CDMA2000 offers several other advantages over competing technologies, including open standards, interoperability, economies of scale, removable user identity modules (R-UIM), seamless global roaming, post- and prepaid solutions, Java, Windows Mobile and BREW-enabled phones, and a large selection of rich and versatile value-added services.

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