TOKYO-KDDI, the second-largest mobile operator in Japan, will terminate its service based on PDC by March 31, 2003, Tadashi Onodera, president of KDDI, said on Thursday.
By terminating the PDC service, a technology unique to Japan, KDDI is going to concentrate its resources on services based on CDMA technology. KDDI launched its services based on CDMA in April 1999. In April 2002, the carrier also launched cdmaOne 1x service, a third-generation (3G) service based on cdmaOne. Currently more than 90 percent of KDDI’s users are subscribing to CDMA-based services.
Since last April, the carrier has been putting an emphasis on cdmaOne 1x sales, which provide users up to 144 kilobits per second (kbps) data transmission service. Onodera on Thursday said the number of users of the cdmaOne 1x service will exceed 1 million by the end of June.
KDDI launched PDC-based service in 1994. The second-generation service is going to be replaced with CDMA service in just nine years. KDDI stopped accepting new users for the PDC system last March. For current PDC service users, KDDI is going to provide CDMA-based terminals with discounted prices.
