Smart taps Docomo know-how on LTE

MANILA, Philippines - Smart Communications Inc. has tapped Japan’s NTT Docomo, one of the world’s first operators of Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, for its technical expertise as it commercially rolled out the technology in the Philippines.

LTE, popularly known as the fastest 4G, is capable of offering download speeds of over 100Mbps. 

Docomo launched LTE in Japan in December 2010, two years ahead of its competitors. And just like Docomo, Smart is the first telco in the Philippines to make available the LTE technology to its subscribers.   

In collaborating with Docomo, Smart wants to make sure it learns from the experts and gains access to best practices.

Prior to the commercial launch last Aug. 25, Smart had worked closely with the Japanese telco, as it went through a year of rigorous beta tests to ensure that its network could handle the deployment of the new technology.

“When we launched LTE in Japan in 2010, we decided to be LTE champions. We wanted to offer new services and new technology to our customers,” said Docomo’s Yoshinori Yasui, a senior technical adviser for Smart’s Technology Services Division.

“By coming out with the technology two years ahead of our competitors, we owned LTE in Japan,” he said.

Over the last two years, he said Docomo has developed many services for its customers using the LTE technology. The most popular in Japan right now are cloud services. 

Docomo also provided a lot of content and application on Japanese animation, music, and movies, making it a breeze for customers to download music and movies.

For the other segments of the market, Docomo offered services such as car navigation and other machine-to-machine applications.

For example, he said, many Japanese companies use a service that enables them to forecast the weather by setting up temperature sensors in their towers that collect information on the climate, temperature, humidity. These data are then transmitted on a real-time basis to the companies’ other offices.

“In the Philippines, Smart can adapt the successful services. We had the advantage of exploring the LTE services early on and so Smart can learn from it,” Yasui said.

“LTE is a very good technology. SMS is more popular than voice calls in the Philippines. People here are fond of Facebook and Twitter and because of this we think migration to LTE technology would be a lot faster compared to 3G,” he said.

Smart launched the country’s first mobile LTE service last Aug. 25. It is available on Plan 3500 and can be used on unlimited via the included USB dongle until Oct. 25.

A 10GB data allocation will take effect after Oct. 25.