[Neutrino]

Originally Posted by matada

Here they are broken into 2 catagories of phones:

Keitai, which actually means portable, is the digital version of the phone or the GSM. It has greater clarity, greater range, but is more costly to operate.

PHS, or "portable handy system", is another format (and the one I am accessing the net from now). The range is terrible and you have to be awfully close to a repeater for it to be effective. It is cheap to operate however, and quite popular with the younger Japanese people, especially in large cities.

This is how DOCOMO describes it:
PHS (Portable Handy phone System): PHS telephone signals are picked up by small antenna, often mounted atop NTT telephone boxes, like the one shown here. From here the PHS telephone signal is carried via ISDN to the nearest NTT exchange.

Probably the best option is offered by DOCOMO as FOMA (sorry, i am not sure what the acronym is for). It detects the closest switch and connects you on either technology. Unforntunately, the phones for FOMA are more bulky than their counterparts and the technology doesn't seem to be catching on.

I wasn't aware that it wasn't Japanese Technology, but it doesn't suprise me. They Japanese are long famous for taking other's technology and improving on or implementing it first.

well i thought docomo was GSM(unfortunatelly my sources for japanese news are mostly second hand) if they are PHS then its not euro technology

the 3G (third gen) GSM is euro tech and meant to bring ISDN data transfer levels...my impresion was that DOCOMO was the 3G developer in japan but it seems that i was wrong(guess is some other company)

here in the US the best we have is a 2.5G GSM ~60kbps and hopefully soon we should start seing 3G thanks to T-Mobile which of course is actually Deutche Telecom