In particular, many major European mobile phone carriers stated they would begin high-speed data services based on HSDPA in or after spring 2006. To fuel this trend, NTT DoCoMo worked with Fujitsu, Motorola and NEC to develop mobile phone handsets in compliance with Category 6, with a data rate of up to 3.6 Mbps. At the 3GSM World Congress 2006 held in Barcelona, DoCoMo conducted a demonstration of i-motion video-clip streaming and FTP file downloads using HSDPA, and it was taken with a great deal of interest among the visitors.

As carriers who have already launched HSDPA services have adopted only PC card type terminals, the demonstration of services for a terminal with the form of a mobile phone handset, such as the i-motion demonstration had a great impact.

One representative from NTT DoCoMo's R&D Division, which is responsible for charting the company's technical vision and strategy, evaluated the situation in this way:"HSDPA is the first step in our advance from W-CDMA to 4G technology, and we have positioned it as 3.5G service.

Since it increases both the capacity and speed of data communications, it enables more multimedia services and applications than before. By developing a prototype mobile phone handset and carrying out field tests to examine its performance, we believe that we have been able to demonstrate our efforts at smoothing the progress of the introduction of HSDPA to the public."

HSDPA, in both mobile phone and PC card form, was recognized as an important trend at 3GSM World Congress 2006.

Another of our representatives pointed out other important aspect of the practical implementation of HSDPA: "Naturally, HSDPA will allow content providers to deliver services with higher added value once it is put into practice. But there is another reason why we developed the HSDPA-compatible mobile phone handsets, and that is because HSDPA improves the efficiency of frequency utilization by a factor of approximately three.

As user needs for high-speed data communications continue to grow, HSDPA becomes extremely significant because it uses the limited wireless environment efficiently and provides high-speed data communications at low cost." NTT DoCoMo is planning to start HSDPA-compliant services in the second quarter of FY2006. It is expected to attract great attention from many carriers currently offering 3G services.