New Japanese operator plans WiMax network

July 07, 2005

A new Japanese telecommunications carrier plans to launch a national wireless network by the end of 2006 that will offer voice and data services using the emerging WiMax network technology combined with city-based WLANs (wireless LANs), a company backing the carrier said on Wednesday.

The WiMax network will consist of about 200,000 access points each with a range of up to 3 kilometers. They will offer connection speeds of around 75M bps (bits per second) and cover 80 percent of Japan's population by the end of 2007, according to Kaori Ogawa, a spokeswoman for Heisei Denden, a Tokyo-based communications carrier.
The service will be run by Japan Wireless, a company set up last September by Heisei Denden and Dream Technologies, a software developer in Tokyo. Japan Wireless expects to receive regulatory approval for the service later this year, Ogawa said.

The Japanese network will use both Wi-Fi and WiMax access points. Both of the networking standards will be supplemented with a technology called MIMO (multiple input multiple output) to boost their speed and range, Ogawa said.

In cities, the Wi-Fi service will offer speeds of between 50M bps and 108M bps, and the access points will have a range of up to 600 meters. Outside the cities, the network will use WiMax access points strung along Heisei Denden's 33,000 kilometer fiber optic network.