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Jan 3 2005

Reuters reports that the world's leading wireless carriers and telecoms equipment makers, including NTT DoCoMo, have agreed to develop an advanced mobile phone standard capable of sending high-resolution video in an instant.

A group of 26 companies, which also include Britain's Vodafone Group, Germany's Siemens, Japan's NEC Corp. and France's Alcatel, will support the standard, according to the Nihon Keizai Shimbun story.

Mobile phone services based on the technology, whose transmission speeds will be more than 10 times as fast as the current third-generation (3G) service, could be launched as early as 2009, the newspaper said.

The unified standard, called "Super 3G," is expected to create demand for cellphones with a large liquid crystal display screen for playing games and watching movies, and to help handset makers cut costs through mass production, the paper said.

In Japan, DoCoMo is likely to invest more than 100 billion yen ($963.6 million) to upgrade its telecoms infrastructure for the introduction of the Super 3G service, it added.