The Asian cellular phone market is something of a paradox. Countries such as Japan and South Korea have invested the equivalent of billions of dollars to develop sophisticated, high-bandwidth wireless services, such as mobile video and mobile commerce technologies. One reason for doing this was so they could lead the world in deployment of such services; however, other countries have been slow to follow that lead. In terms of sophisticated cellular data services, Japan and South Korea are well ahead of their European and North American counterparts.