Japanese media: Industry insiders say it will take several years for Japan to achieve 5G nationwide coverage

According to a report by Japan's Jiji Press on the 3rd, Japan's major mobile operators are racing to build base stations for ultra-high-speed 5G services, but it is expected that it will take several years for Japan to achieve nationwide 5G coverage.

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Despite high interest in 5G, which is 100 times faster than 4G and can download a two-hour movie in seconds, compared with about five minutes on 4G, the service is currently only available in limited areas within Japan.

Japanese telecom companies NTT Docomo, KDDI Corp and SoftBank launched 5G services in March last year, followed by Rakuten Mobile Inc. six months later. “Although it has been a difficult time recently due to the spread of the new coronavirus, sales of mobile phones that can use 5G services are good,” said an executive vice president of KDDI.

The report pointed out that although the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications of Japan has quadrupled its target for the number of 5G base stations to be completed by the end of fiscal 2023 to 280,000, and the ministry has decided to allow operators to use 4G base stations for 5G services starting this winter, industry insiders said that since the bandwidth of the base stations will not change after the conversion, the network speed will remain unchanged.

The area that radio waves using 5G technology can reach is limited, so a large number of base stations need to be built to achieve wide signal coverage.

As a result, many industry insiders, including Jun Sawada, president of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., parent company of NTT Docomo, believe 5G services will not be available nationwide until around 2025.

The Nikkei reported in June 2017 that DoCoMo President Kazuhiro Yoshizawa said at the time that "5G services will be expanded to major regions across Japan within three years," indicating an expectation of providing 5G services across Japan as early as 2023.