Tokyo wholesale broadband Internet provider eAccess Thursday said it expects to begin tests in April of a high-speed wireless data system that can deliver speeds up to 3.6M bit/sec.
Tokyo wholesale broadband Internet provider eAccess Thursday said it expects to begin tests in April of a high-speed wireless data system that can deliver speeds up to 3.6M bit/sec.
The company will use high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) technology, which works on a Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) 3G network to provide higher speeds than the basic 384K bit/sec that is currently offered by most carriers.
The tests will make use of Lucent’s IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) technology and Lucent will provide eAccess with wireless and data networking equipment, software and base stations, the companies said. They did not mention the value of the deal. Fujitsu is to supply network management equipment on a trial basis for the experiment, said company spokesman Fumihiko Hirose.
The company still needs a licence from Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications before it can begin the tests. It expects the licence to be granted by the end of April, said Takashi Igarashi, a company spokesman.
EAccess plans to test the technology for six months to a year. After this, it wants to build a national network that will provide basic voice and data communications at initial speeds of up to 3.6M bit/sec. The network can be upgraded to 14.4M bit/sec at a later time, he said.
If the company succeeds in developing a national network based on the technology, it will become the first fixed broadband provider to offer high-speed wireless services in Japan, bringing it into competition with NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile carrier. DoCoMo is also planning an HSDPA service.
The operational network would provide services at a low fixed monthly charge and would initially begin in Tokyo and other major cities. A full network would take more than two years to build, he said.
NTT DoCoMo, the first company in the world to launch a WCDMA service, intends to have an HSDPA network operational in metropolitan areas by the end of March 2006. The HSDPA network will run at 14M bit/sec for both downlink and uplink, according to the company.
EAccess declined comment on how much its services would cost, but the company wants to offer a low-priced alternative to DoCoMo’s services, Igarashi said.
The company will have a technology advantage over DoCoMo because, unlike DoCoMo, its network will be IP based and it is relatively easy for the company to introduce low, flat rate charges, said Nahoko Mitsuyama, a principal analyst at Gartner Japan.
“It’s going to be very good for the consumer,” she said.
Vodafone KK, the Japanese unit of Vodafone Group, is also considering rolling out an HSDPA network in Japan, but has not decided when, said spokesman Matthew Nicholson.
This week Vodafone began field tests of a technology called Flash (fast low-latency access with seamless handoff) Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) that was developed by New Jersey’s Flarion Technologies. The system can deliver data at speeds of up to 3M bit/sec and Vodafone’s tests are due to last several months, Nicholson said.
