Japan Launching WiMAX Rival
Posted by Sam Churchill on September 5th, 2008Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications auctioned two blocks of broadband wireless spectrum in the 2.5 GHz band last December. Cellular carrier KDDI, with a WiMAX strategy, was the winner of one nationwide license. Willcom was awarded the other.
Japan’s Wireless Broadband Planning, KDDI’s WiMax joint venture, has committed to spending 145 billion Japanese yen ($1.3 billion) through March 2014. UQ Communication is a consortium consisting of 6 companies such as Kyocera and Intel Capital, led by KDDI. A trial in Tokyo and Yokohama from February of 2009 will be followed by nation-wide commercial Mobile WiMAX service in the summer of 2009.
The other license winner in Japan is personal handyphone system (PHS) operator Willcom. They plan to invest $1.7 billion over six years on a broadband wireless network at 2.5 GHz.
But Willcom is not planning a WiMAX implementation.
Willcom plans to use the Japanese Personal Handyphone System (PHS), with a new standard called XGP that will offer mobile broadband speeds that rival WiMAX and LTE, reports Telecom TV.
The Willcom trial begins next April and will cover Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka and offer 20Mbps of symmetrical data speeds using a 10MHz spectrum block. A full commercial service is scheduled for August 2009.
PHS was an early digital cellular offshoot with roots in cordless phone technology. It has low power, low range characteristics and was adopted there mostly because it was deemed suitable for Japan’s high urban densities back in the 1990s. It’s cheaper to deploy than GSM, but isn’t so good at high-speed handover and is now losing ground in its home market to GSM.
But a cost-effective next gen platform for data may be possible with the eXtended Global Platform (XGP) . According to Nobuaki Takamatsu from the engineering department of Kyocera, a trial XGP service will go live in three Japanese cities as early as next April.
On display at the XGP booth at the ITU Asia show was a base station that was the size of small hand luggage as well as prototype data cards and USB dongles. At this point, the system is designed for data only services, but handsets are expected at a later stage.
The technology behind is based on the PHS architecture of numerous microcells offering limited coverage, but will incorporate a new air radio interface based on OFDMA/TDMA/TDD methodologies. Kyocera and UTStarcom will manufacture the radio access equipment for XGP while NEC Infrontia and NetIndex are developing the data card modules for the service. Canada’s Wavesat and Israel’s Altair is supplying the baseband chips for XGP. Like LTE and WiMAX, XGP will support viable spectrum blocks.
Japan has some 52 million landline telephones and 105 million mobile and PHS users (as of 2007) with a mobile penetration rate over 80%. NTT Docomo has more than 50 million customers, which is more than half of Japan’s cellular market. The rest is largely split between CDMA cellular provider KDDI (which spun off their PHS business as Willcom), and Softbank.
The United States has more than 250 million cellular subscribers but they’re spread over some 3.8 million square miles, while Japan’s land mass is only 146,000 sq miles.
source : dailywireless.org
No comments:
Post a Comment