WiMax in Japan Looking Down on 3G

According to this report filed from the recent WiMAX Forum Congress Asia event in Singapore, Takeshi Tanaka - president of UQ Communications - is quoted; “People are beginning to think that cellular internet is fake.. the browser is limited, the content and performance are limited, and so are the screen sizes. This is our opportunity to differentiate from the 3G style”. So, the gloves are off!

According to Tanaka, UQ has been achieving up to 16Mbps on the downlink and up to 3.9Mbps on the uplink since free trials of the service began in February 2009. The trials are taking place in Tokyo (all 23 wards), Yokohama and Kawasaki using some 600 Samsung base stations, which are compliant to WiMAX Forum Wave-2 Phase-2 specifications. Wave-2 Phase-2 supports various additional features compared with Wave-2 Phase-1, such as QoS for real-time and near real-time video, multicast broadcast services, and IPv6. Moreover, UQ is the first major mobile WiMAX operator to use FFR (fractional frequency reuse), which, says UQ, can improve overall spectrum efficiency by 85 per cent compared with a typical ‘3-frequency’ operation.