WILLCOM Inc. (headquarter: Minato District, Tokyo, Japan; President: Mr. Masaki Kikugawa) concluded a contract to carry out joint feasibility study with Asia Wireless Communication Co., Ltd. (here in after as AWC) in Bangkok, Thailand today, in order to introduce the Next-Generation PHS into Thailand.

AWC has started providing PHS service in the city of Bangkok since November, 1999 and is cooperating with WILLCOM to provide international roaming service between Thailand and Japan since December, 2003. As a succeeding system that WILLCOM is wrestling for its commercialization, Next-Generation PHS is hoped to be introduced to Thailand. The two companies decided to cooperate in a way that WILLCOM provides technical support, while AWC carries out studies including feasibility studies of Next-Generation PHS’ commercialization in Thailand.

PHS is a telecom system developed in Japan and applied widely in Asian countries including China and Thailand. It has also expanded to South America with worldwide users surpassed 100million recently. Next-Generation PHS, as a succeeding system to PHS, is a standard technology acknowledged by PHS MoU Group and recommended by ITU as one of the BWA systems.

Based on the current PHS technology, Next-Generation PHS is a high combination of OFDM and MIMO technology that helps to realize the data communication speed of over 20Mbps.

Based on the achievement made in building and maintaining 160,000 PHS micro cells cross out Japan, WILLCOM will improve the efficiency of radio frequency usage by knitting the micro cell network for Next-Generation PHS in the same way.

WILLCOM will keep making effort to spread Next-Generation PHS internationally in future.