In this interview with Fumio Watanabe, CTO at Japanese communications provider UQ Communications (UQC) and executive director of its parent KDDI, we hear how Japanese mobile operators are fast running out of network capacity, how KDDI is using all of its access networks to distribute its own loads, and what plans its subsidiary company UQC has to launch WiMAX 2 services.
Japanese mobile WiMAX player UQ Communications and vendor Samsung have published the results of a trial WiMAX 2 802.16m system, which achieved network speeds of 330Mbps.
The WiMAX industry continues to suffer from delays and a lack of scale, but can now point to signs that volumes may finally be on the way due a growing number of significant deployments by operators such as Packet One in Malaysia, Yota and Comstar in Russia, Cleawire and its MVNO Time Warner Cable in the US, and UQ Communications in Japan.
Japan may be home to a high amount of cellular internet users – 87 per cent of the country’s 106 cellphone users go online – but that does not faze Takeshi Tanaka, president of UQ Communications, which is gearing up to launch commercial mobile WiMAX services on 1st July 2009.
WIMAX Vision speaks to Shuichi Kako, associate senior VP at UQ Communications, about the operator’s plans for a nationwide mobile WIMAX network and how UQ intends to differentiate from ’3.5G’ and wireline broadband plays inJapan.
UQ Communications, a 2.5GHz licence holder in Japan, and which counts Intel and Samsung among its investors, has announced it will start trials of its mobile WiMAX service on 26 February. The trial will continue until 30 June this year.
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