SIM vendor Gemalto has said that its LTE technology has been selected by NTT Docomo for the Japanese carrier’s LTE roll-out.

Docomo’s LTE service, dubbed Xi, will employ Gemalto’s Universal Integrated Circuit Cards (UICC), which the company said had been tailored to meet the Docomo’s stringent performance standards. The function of the UICC card is to authenticate the subscriber on the network and store applications for both the operator and the end-user.

Gemalto expects the UICC cards to be used by more than 15 million Docomo LTE subscribers over the next three years.

NTT Docomo’s Xi LTE network currently covers the major urban centres of Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, and plans to scale this out to reach 70 per cent of the Japanese population by March 2015.

“Docomo is leading the introduction of LTE in Japan and Gemalto is ideally placed to bring the latest in LTE technology”, Tan Teck-Lee, President of Gemalto Asia, said in a statement. “Working together, we will drive innovative solutions and services to enrich Docomo’s subscriber experience.”