DoCoMo targets 30m LTE subs by 2015

Dylan Bushell-Embling | November 03, 2011

telecomasia.net

Japan's NTT DoCoMo has laid out is expansion plans for the next few years, including reaching 30 million LTE subscribers by 2015.

The company's medium-term plan, released today, also details ambitions to nearly quadruple its total smartphone customer base to 40 million by fiscal 2015.

This compares to an estimated 1.3 million subscribers to its Xi LTE network - and 10.2 million total smartphone customers - for FY11.

DoCoMo to increase total packet revenues by 1.5 times over the period, but this is dwarfed by an expected 12-fold increase in wireless traffic growth.

To accommodate for the deluge, the company aims to increase its use of femtocells and Wi-Fi, and more than triple the amount of hotspots for the Mzone public wireless LAN service.

DoCoMo hopes to achieve around 60% population coverage for the Xi network in FY12, 80% in FY13 and 98% in FY14.

Xi-related capex will likely grow from around 330 billion yen ($4.23 billion) for the period between FY10 and FY12 to around 550 billion yen between FY13 and FY15.

NTT DoCoMo has already started testing LTE-Advanced, and the roadmap suggests that DoCoMo could begin commercial deployments in or around FY15.

Source:

telecomasia.net

Dylan Bushell-Embling

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