When the two services hit the streets earlier this year, optimism among operators everywhere was extremely high.Seven months on and the picture is far more bleak. NTT DoCoMo was recently forced to admit that the take-up of its 3G service had been atrocious: the group had expected three million users by now, but instead had to settle for just 130,000.KDDI, by contrast, managed to draw in new customers at a much faster pace and at considerably lower average costs That is worrying for the five mobile onlookers in the UK. They are committed to using the same standard as NTT DoCoMo (called WCDMA), but all the success so far has been with KDDI (which operates a system called Cdma 1X).The problems at NTT DoCoMo are blamed on several factors, of which the first is that the 3G service on offer has yet to come up with the “killer application” that would make the technology a must-have. When the company launched i-mode, it made headway with a number of good ideas.

One of the best-sellers was a constantly updated horoscope service that was at one stage receiving more than one million hits a day. Younger users were also big fans of the ability to download cartoon images of Pok?n characters.But that set Japanese expectations high. The assumption was that any superior technology would deliver better applications, which so far it has not. So it’s no wonder that many UK operators won’t be pinned down on a 3G launch date.But the most critical Japanese discovery is that, despite all the hysteria, the extra bandwidth is not much use without popular applications. NTT DoCoMo 3G’s download rate may be twice as fast as KDDI’s, but so far that has made very little difference to anyone This doesn’t bode well for the UK operators.

Customers may decide to stick with GPRS phones (such as the devices being offered by mmO2) instead of trading up to 3G.KDDI’s strategy has been far better focused on what customers want. With the “Sha-Mail” service, the company anticipated the appetite for swapping photographs. It has also developed a popular system for sending greetings cards over the network, and another that lets users swap ring-tones. Biggest of all has been the success of software allowing users to download video games.But it is on the issue of standards that the likes of Vodafone may now worry they have backed the wrong horse.

KDDI’s system not only uses its existing network of masts, but has been designed to work on existing handset technology. Accordingly, it can be rolled out nationwide relatively quickly. The extra hardware investment required by NTT DoCoMo’s WCDMA means that, for the moment, the market is restricted to Tokyo.”The delay in penetration of [NTT DoCoMo's] service in Japan has caused foreign mobile carriers that have chosen the same standard to question whether they should initiate 3G services in their own countries as scheduled,” says ING analyst Hitoshi Hayakawa. “We believe there is a possibility that some European carriers may adopt Cdma 1X.”Based on the Japanese experience, the UK operators face a stark choice: back 3G all the way and hope the extra investment will one day pay off, or stick with the lower-cost but less technologically advanced services. Given the apparent vacuum of ideas about exactly what to do with 3G, the more basic option is beginning to look appealing.. In the century since his infamous Whitechapel murders, the search for the identity of Jack the Ripper has consumed numerous authors and armchair detectives, most as obscure as the Ripper himself. But the latest investigator into Britain’s most famous unsolved murder mystery is in a different league.