Thank you Chairman. Good morning, Ladies and Gentlemen. It is indeed an honor and a pleasure for me to have the opportunity to say a few words here at the 1998 Annual General Meeting of PHS MoU Group as a representative of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications , Japan.
Firstly, I would like to express my thanks to the Australian Communications Authority and the Australian PHS Forum for supporting this conference, and congratulation to all of the PHS MoU Group members.
Australian Communications Authority and Australian PHS Forum have accomplished their roles in introducing and promoting PHS in Australia. It is entirely fitting that this General Meeting is held here in Sydney.
In Japan, the PHS service was introduced in 1995. As you may be aware, the number of PHS subscribers in Japan has slightly decreased in the past several months. However, it is an amazing fact that PHS reached 7 million subscribers in only 2 years since no other mobile communication services have ever spread in such a large number in such a short years.
Contrary to the decrease in the number of PHS subscribers, call traffic has been continuously increasing, and additional new services, such as 32k bits data transmission service, short message service and location information service, have also been attracting more users. Now we can say PHS service in Japan has a firm hold on the Japanese life stile as a personal communication system.
With the growth of the varied PHS subscribers, more convenient services and technologies are being requested by the users, operators and manufactures. To response to these needs, we, MPT of Japan, established the committee named “the PHS technology enhancement committee” this April.
Since then, we have strongly promoted the study and have completed it just at the beginning of this week. I am not going to detail it here. At the PHS Symposium in the afternoon, our study is to be presented in details. We hope our study will be shared by users, operators and manufactures throughout the world and will be useful for the spread of PHS globally.
We are optimistic about the future of PHS and the coexistence with the IMT-2000. PHS MoU Group established the Next Generation PHS Study Working Group. We also are very eager to support the development of PHS in the future. We and PHS MoU Group will have the opportunity to exchange the opinions on the next generation PHS. We expect a verity of ideas will come through PHS MoU Group.
I would like to emphasize that the role of PHS MoU Group in the future will be much more important. Responding to diversify the needs for the PHS in the world, we, MPT of Japan, would like to continue to support the activities of the PHS MoU Group.
On concluding my remarks, I would like to extend my appreciation to the PHS MoU Group and I wish you a successful 1998 Annual General Meeting.