Bloomberg News ran speed tests on SoftBank’s 5G network in Tokyo and clocked downloads of up to 1.1 gigabits per second, with uploads of about 30 megabits. Until now, that kind of speed has needed a fiber optic cable run straight into the home.
The network was a month old at the time. SoftBank, KDDI and NTT Docomo all switched on 5G in late March 2020, in a handful of metropolitan areas. Rakuten, the newcomer, was aiming for June.
Coverage is thin
Finding a signal was the hard part. All three major carriers posted the street addresses where early adopters could pick up 5G bars. In Bloomberg’s test, the best reception came inside SoftBank’s store in Tokyo’s Ginza district. About a block away, the signal fell to nothing.
SoftBank plans to extend service to larger parts of Tokyo and other big cities later in the year. It does not expect to reach 90% of the population until March 2022 at the latest.
The physics is part of the problem. Japan’s 5G starts at 3.6 gigahertz, a higher frequency than earlier networks use. That buys speed and costs range, so carriers need more equipment to cover the same ground. Kirk Boodry, an analyst at Redex Holdings who writes for Smartkarma, said this matters less in a dense country like Japan than in sprawling ones such as the United States.
Speed with little to use it on
The apps on SoftBank’s first 5G phones run fine over ordinary Wi-Fi, Bloomberg found. Several lean on pop idols, such as multi-angle and 3-D views of AKB48 performances. An app for streaming the new domestic pro basketball league had nothing to show, because the coronavirus had canceled every game. SoftBank was also launching a cloud gaming service with Nvidia.
Boodry was blunt about the carriers’ position. “The coverage is still going to be spotty for a while,” he said. “And since all of the operators upgraded to 5G at the same time, there is no advantage. The primary selling point is just speed.”
The carriers hope fast service will persuade customers to buy bigger data plans. History argues against it. SoftBank’s average revenue per user was 4,440 yen in its latest quarter, up less than 10% since it introduced the iPhone 3G more than a decade earlier. “Carriers have basically been trading capacity for revenue,” Boodry said.
Son’s wider bet
SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son is trying not to leave the carriers as “dumb pipes” for Apple, Netflix and Google. Last year he merged SoftBank’s Yahoo Japan with the messaging service Line, a strategy he calls “beyond carrier.” The company’s $100 billion Vision Fund has put money into about 90 businesses, including robotics, cancer detection and autonomous driving, and SoftBank paid $32 billion to own ARM Holdings outright.
“We don’t know what the really popular applications will be,” Boodry said.
Sources
- SoftBank’s Super-Fast 5G Network Isn’t Very Useful Just Yet – OERLive
- SoftBank launches 5G mmWave in Japan with Qualcomm – TelecomLead
