WiMAX in the Wild - Japan

It has become a bit silent around WiMAX in the past year or so with Clearwire being the only major network operator deploying the technology and making the news. WiMAX is also deployed in South Korea in the form of WiBro and some smaller networks exist elsewhere. What I didn't know so far was that Japan also has a WiMAX network on here. Here's a picture I've taken on a recent visit to Tokyo in an electronics store that sold WiMAX 3G dongles and notebooks with built in WiMAX cards. The main argument: The theoretical peak data rates are faster than those of the HSPA networks of the competitors. I wonder if that matters in practice?

Comments

[Michal Morawiec]

"WiMAX 3G dongles" or just "WiMAX dongles"? ;)

[Martin]

Hi Michal,

Well, WiMAX is a 3G technology, I meant it in that sense. I don't think there's a WCDMA part in it (i.e. UMTS).

Martin

[George]

On my field tests I got better results with WiMAX compared with EMOBILE by a factor of 1.7
However UQCommunications has about 300.000 users compared with almost 3 million of EMOBILE.
It is worth mentioning that after 1 year of service EMOBILE had almost 1 million users, while UQ was still at about 200.000

[Michael]

WiMax networks in Moscow and Saint Petersburg (Yota) are quite large, and I'm getting better speed and pings there than on UMTS from local mobile providers.