New mobile phone entrant Ymobile Corp. unveiled monthly fixed-price service plans Thursday that include voice calling and Internet access to woo newcomers to smartphones with simpler and cheaper contracts.
The SoftBank subsidiary, launched in June in a merger with eAccess, which runs Emobile, and Willcom, a PHS carrier, also revealed its first handset lineup.
The three data plans are the S plan, which charges ?2,980 per month for 1 gigabyte worth of data usage, the M plan, which costs ?3,980 for 3 GB of data, and the premium L plan, which costs ?5,980 for 7 GB a month.
All three come with 300 free 10-minute voice calls and will be available in August.
Ymobile President Eric Gan said only half of Japan¡¯s cellphone subscribers use smartphones, which is significantly lower than in markets like Singapore and South Korea.
He blamed this difference on Japan¡¯s expensive and complicated monthly plans.
¡°Let¡¯s make it simple and easy to understand,¡± he said.
The three established carriers, NTT Docomo, KDDI¡¯s au and SoftBank, charge ?2,700 for unlimited voice calls and ?3,500 for 2 GB worth of data usage per month.
Ymobile will also launch a service together with partner Yahoo Japan called Packet Mileage. Ymobile users will receive Mileage points when they use Yahoo Japan¡¯s services, including its home page or apps, it said.
The points can be exchanged for more data use capacity.
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