WiMax and 5G in 2021
Back before the year 2000, I had a PHS phone. If you're reading this in English, you may not even know what that is. PHS was a technology similar to ECT digital cordless phones that can roam between phone bases, but it was operated by carriers like Willcomm and Tuka (my carrier back in the day). I believe Tuka was bought out by J-Phone, and eventuall Au or someone else. Willcomm was absorbed into Softbank or one of the other major carriers.
The advantage of PHS was that it was cheap. The main disadvantage was that it wasn't designed to use while moving. You could walk around and use a PHS phone at the same time, but if you were on a car or train, the connection would drop. Since they were mainly used for voice calls, and those are uncommon on trains (and to a lesser extent, cars), this wasn't a huge problem.
PHS phones were not compatible with the systems in use overseas at the time, so for example, a US GSM blackberry would not work in Japan, and my PHS phone would not work in the US. Sometimes this happens due to frequencies, but in this case it was due to totally different technologies.
When Japan implemented 3G technology (FOMA, etc.), they were mostly compatible with 3G from overseas. For example, 3G phones sold by Docomo and Softbank would work in many European countries, and also in the US on AT&T or T-Mobile's networks. Phones sold by KDDI's Au would probably have worked with Verizon. All of the other minor carriers in Japan operated on some variation of 3G GSM, including eMobile.
I started using Softbank in 2008 for my phone service, and since the data was overpriced, I got a USB dongle for my laptop from eMobile. The speed was modest, and the coverage wasn't the best, but eMobile offered unlimited data for a cheap price. They did not purposely throttle you (although the contract said they could), and they did not charge you more beyond a certain amount.
Softbank, on the other hand, offered me two options for my iPhone 4.
1. Pay $20 for 14MB of data
2. Pay something like $40 for "unlimited" data.
Since by this time I had a pocket WiFi from eMobile, I opted for plan #1. I figured that if I needed to use a lot of data for watching videos or something, I would just power up the pocket wifi and connect to that, since the iPhone had WiFi anyway. I quickly found out, though, that an iPhone will go through 14MB of data in a few hours if automatic mail or other sync services are turned on. Once you went over the 14MB, they would automatically bill you more, so that the month would cost more than if you had just gone with the unlimited plan. So, although their explanation was something along the lines of "you pay less for the months when you use less, but you can still use more in months when you need to!", the reality was that if you had the data turned on at all, you would be paying more for the cheaper plan each and every month. I left the data off, and always left the pocket WiFi on. Back in those days, however, the battery life on portable routers wasn't so great. As soon as you went over whatever the cap on the "unlimited" service was, Softbank would throttle your connection, hard, until the end of the month. it would slow to 128k, which is slow even by 2g standards. This wasn't the ed of the world since it was phones we were talking about, but it still made paying for an "unlimited" plan that much sillier. Worse yet, they did not offer a voice/SMS only plan for the iPhone, you *had* to pay the $20 for data, whether you wanted it or not. Even worse, they enforced this through separate SIM locking to differentiate iPhones from iPads (which were data only), Android phones, and feature phones. You couldn't get a voice only phone if you planned to use external data, and you couldn't get a data only plan if you wanted to use VOIP. Eventually the government stepped in and "recommended" that carriers stop SIM locking alltogether (or else they would legally mandate it). Although this ended the shenanigans, the fake "unlimited" plans continued, although with clearer warnings about the limitations.
Emobile kept doubling their speeds, for the same price, kept introducing better pocket WiFi units, and still allowed unlimited usage. When I upgraded the last time, the sales person told me "it's okay to use this the same way you would use a land line, as we have no plans to throttle". I told him I used over 100GB per month, and he had no issue with that whatsoever. And it worked perfectly fine. Before LTE was introduced, they even had a router that went above the theoretical maximum speeds by making two different connections to two different cell towers simultaneously, thus doubling the speed - again at the same price. That router, however, also doubled as a pocket warmer. When they introduced LTE, nothing changed except the speed. The speed was so good, in fact, that when I moved, I decided not to set up a new fiber land line. I had always used Youtube a lot, and when Hulu was introduced, I started watching that for hours per day without issues.
Then one day, boom! Throttled to 128k. This was because, sadly, Softbank bought eMobile and started enforcing throttling. I actually had 3 pocket WiFi units at that time, one for personal that I kept at home, one for work that I took with me, and one for a friend that was in my name. One by one, as the contract periods expired, I cancelled them, and I wasn't shy about explaining why I did so. And think about it - this was for a computer centric connection. Gmail wouldn't even load, because it would would time out loading all the Javascript, etc. Operating system updates (which are typically a hundred megabytes) are not realistically possible, and streaming video services like Hulu and Youtube would not work even at the lowest bitrates.
So I started looking for alternative carriers. Docomo was more expensive that Softbank, but I switched to them out of spite for my phone plan. Later, when MVNOs became more widely available, I switched to Sony Nuro, and later OCN - both of which use Docomo SIMs/Towers. (In fact, OCN is a different child company of the same company which owns Docomo).
For pocket WiFi, I obviously wasn't going to use Softbank, so my major options were Docomo, AU, or an MVNO of one of those. At the time, Docomo wanted something like $80 per month for around 10GB. Au was similar. The MNVO carriers like Nuro, OCN, and Mineo offered lower prices with more data, but even if it was $50 for 20GB, the problem was still the same - the data was inherently limited so a small enough amount that I would run against it. My usage scenarios include: Hard disk backup, downloading operating system updates, using bittorrent to download OS images, video streaming, desktop sharing, video conferencing, etc. Hard disk backup alone could easily use up 20GB. Even if I disabled that, I would probably still hit that limit pretty quickly. For example, an hour long video in youtube played in HD (not 4k!) is something like 1500MB. Therefore, watching an hour each day for 10 days would be 15GB.
To me, it was laughable that despite the fact that they keep advertising faster speeds, they don't want people to actually *use* them. For example, what is the point of a connection that is twice as fast, if it only means you can use up your monthly quote in 2 days instead of 3. In fact, something like Youtube would see that extra speed and automatically switch you into 4K mode! oops! (1 hour of the highest quality 4K video on youtube is about 30GB!)
The reason I switched to OCN for my phone was because they had a plan that was limited by day instead of by month. That means if you accidentally downloaded some large file, you would only be throttled until the next day, not the entire month. If I for some reason needed to use more data on my phone, I could always pay an extra $5 for unlimited data for the day.
For the computer, though, what to do?
I found UQ WiMax. WiMax is a different technology than WiFi or LTE, that sits somewhere in the middle. It is faster than LTE but slower than WiFi. It has longer range than WiFi, but typically less than LTE. More importantly, UQ was offering actual unlimited plans - sort-of.
I'll discuss the WiMax only routers first, since that is the simpler case.
If you have the normal unlimited plan, then you pay something like $45 per month, and you get unlimited data. The speed is pretty good, but depends on the router. In the best case, it is 440Mbps download, and somewhat slower upload. If you go over 10GB in any rolling 3 day period, you will be throttled - but there are three caveats:
1. The throttling is to 1Mbps - not so bad. You can still watch videos, use gmail, etc.
2. The throttling is only during the peak hours of 18:00 - 23:00
3. The throttling is only for 1 day.
This means that if your plan was to download 15 terabytes of data, you would find that starting on day 4, your speed would be slow during the evening, and so your download would take longer than you planned.
Realistically, for the average user, this means that if they binge all day for 2 or 3 days, then on the evening of the following day, YouTube or similar services would still work fine, but they would slow down to 1Mbps for the next evening, and the quality would adjust accordingly. If you keep using a lot of data every day, then you will keep your three day average up, and you will probably be throttled every day. If you don't use your router for a day or so, then of course you will be up to full speed the next evening. A user who unknowingly downloaded a 10GB windows update file or something like that probably wouldn't even notice the difference.
This seems fair - I am all for throttling heavy users if there are others who they might be interfering with. For example, if I have used 100GB and my neighbor has only used 1GB, and they are trying to check their email, my BitTorrent shouldn't hog all the bandwidth and prevent them from opening their mail. On the other hand, throttling me to 128k for the rest of the month even if nobody else is trying to use the same tower is just punitive.
Although the system seems a little complex at first, at least UQ was up front about it. Furthermore, the end result is that you are never throttled below 1Mbps even in the worst case. The only issue then, is coverage. UQ offers a trial service, where you can order a router for two weeks for testing the coverage in your area. You have to send it back when the 2 weeks is done, but it is useful nonetheless. I ordered this, and it arrived at my house relatively quickly. I tried it in my house, near Shinjuku and Ikebukuro stations (where it might be slow because there are a lot of users), at work, and at some other places where I often used my Pocket WiFi before. The coverage and speed was fine. While I rarely saw anything like 220 Mbps (which I think was the Max speed at the time with the unit I was loaned), I regularly saw over 50, and often over 100. I also tested VPN usage and bittorrent (to make sure nothing was blocked), and downloaded some large files including operating system updates, iTunes videos, Virtual Machine Images, etc, to the tune of 200GB. No issue whatsoever.
I figured that the SIM for their demo unit might have the throttling restrictions removed since it potentially gets loaned out to different people each month, but when I got the real unit, it worked just as well.
Hence I have been using UQ WiMax for at least 5 years now. It isn't the cheapest, but it also isn't bullshit. For practical purposes it is unlimited, and the throttling they do have in place is well documented.
... but that's in urban areas - what about in the countryside?
That's where things get interesting. UQ is owned by Au (or KDDI), and most of the routers can connect not only to the WiMax network, but Au LTE as well. That means that instead of needing to have two routers, one for WiMax in the city and one for LTE in the countryside - you can simply have one router that works both places. Fantastic, right? Well, ignoring for the moment the fact that Au's coverage isn't as good as Docomo's, there is another "issue".
For some plans, you need to pay extra to use LTE. For those plans, turning on the LTE even for a minute will trigger an extra option which will be charged for the whole month (around $10). For some other plans, including mine, the LTE option was included for free. Honestly, I rarely use it, but it's nice to know it's there. LTE data, however, seems to be a rarer commodity, and just like Docomo, Softbank (and indeed even Au) limit LTE data, UQ does the same when using the Au LTE network. There is a set amount of 7GB that can be used in the month, and when you exceed that, the LTE is throttled to 128k for the rest of the month. That's to be expected - but here's what I did not expect. For some reason, the WiMax is also throttled until the end of the month. That means that you can enable LTE if you like, but you should be very careful not to go over the magic 7GB limit, or your unlimited WiMax will also become very limited indeed. For this reason, I leave the LTE mode off on my router 99% of the time. If I want to use it on the subway, I turn it on temporarily, and then turn it off again. I don't need to care at all if my WiMax data usage is 2GB or 2TB, but I most certainly care if my LTE usage is 6.5 GB or 7.5 GB - as the latter will render my router useless for the rest of the month.
The maximum data rate for UQ WiMax has doubled from 220Mbps to 440Mbps in the past few years, but there have been no other major changes to speak of. Most of the MVNOs who sell the WiMax service offer the same terms at slightly cheaper prices. Meanwhile, 5G is being implemented by all the major carriers in Japan. I thought it would be interesting to see how this would end up affecting WiMax, and nothing had happened yet.
(There have been some other pseudo speed increases, as UQ has offered some routers which could use 4G LTE and WiMax at the same time to get the combined total speed of both technologies - but this is not so interesting, since the 7GB LTE limit still applies).
Recently, though, Au and UQ announced 5G + WiMax service.
Au started first, with a router from Sharp, which handles both types of 5G (more about that later), and WiMax as well. The maximum speed they advertise is 4.5Gbps! I won't go into any more detail about that here, since I don't use Au WiMax.
Now UQ has started offering, since last month, a 5G + WiFi plan as well.
The terms of the plan are interesting. First of all, the WiMax 3 Day limit has been changed from 10GB to15GB. That means that even if you don't want to use the Au network, or don't even live within 5G coverage range, you can now use 50% more data without being throttled. (When you are throttled, it is still to the same 1Mbps and still for the same 18:00 to 23:00 the next day).
The router offered by UQ is from Samsung, and supports only the slower of the two 5G standards being rolled out in Japan - so 2.5Gbps download. The router is large, with a large battery and screen. Basically, it looks almost like a smart phone, but it has all the bells and whistles of a mobile router. Still:
1. It doesn't much matter, as even at LTE speeds, it is easy to use up your monthly allotment for non-WiMax. It would be even faster to use up at 2.5Gbps (assuming you ever saw that kind of speed in real life).
2. 2.5Gbps is still faster than 440 Mbps, so if you had a file less than your monthly limit that you just had to download at the fastest speed humanly possible, then the 5G mode would be your friend either way.
Another change to the contract is that the monthly limit for 5G (NR) is now 15GB, instead of the 7GB it was for LTE. So, you do at least get twice as much cellular data. That may be useful if you are often in the countryside, or you are often watching streaming videos on the subway.
Even better, the logic of the cellular data cap throttling has now been changed. When you go over the 15GB of 5G data for the month, you will still be throttled (probably to 128k) for the rest of the month - but only for 5G/LTE - your WiMax connection will not be affected. Practically speaking, that means you can leave the Hybrid mode enabled without worry.
The main downside of this new plan is that the Cellular option is not free for now, so any month where you use it, you have to pay the $10 extra. Still, even if you plan on using it every month, and so the plan is effectively $10 more expensive than the old one, you do get 50% higher limit for WiMax throttling, double the LTE/5G data, the ability to receive 5G signals, and the stupid WiMax 128k throttling when you are over your LTE/5G limit has been disabled.
So what about the 5G coverage?
My main reason to buy this router is because it has a big battery and the data plan is better, but for people who really want to try the 5G networking speeds, they may be disappointed. Coverage is still spotty in Tokyo, and the Samsung router only supports the "sub6" standard.
Basically, there are two 5G NR standards:
1. So called "Sub 6", which is frequencies lower than 6 Ghz.
2. Other standards, mainly the so-called "Millimeter wave" frequencies, more like 30 Ghz.
The 30 Ghz signals allow for higher transmission speeds, but they also are very directional and easily blocked. The Sub6 frequencies, on the other hand, are not blocked quite as easily, but can't support as high of a data transfer rate. Au is building out both standards, but if you are only going to have one supported in your phone or router, you probably want it to be the one with greater range. The 30 Ghz standards are mainly reasonable for indoor usage where there might be a micro-cell nearby.
(Also note, that since the speeds of either standard are higher than typical AC Wifi, you need to use a USB cable to connect the router to your computer to get those kind of speeds anyway).
At the moment, there are only pockets of 5G coverage, even in Tokyo, so if will be a while until it will be usable outside of urban areas. Since the main reason to use WiMax if to get more or less unlimited data, and the main reason to use cellular data on a WiMax router is for when you are out of WiMax range, it doesn't seem to me that a lot of people will be connecting to 5G with their WiMax routers anytime soon, other than for experimentation.
Interestingly, some people are using a lot less data because of the pandemic, and some people are using a lot more. For those who used it mainly outside like me, they are probably using less, simply because they go outside less. For those who use a pocket WiFi as their main internet at home, they are probably using it more as they are in the office less. I realize that I am not a great example of a "Typical User", so just for fun, I loaned my mobile router to a friend since last month and told her to use it as she normally would.
-- Updates --
I have it on good authority that the Galaxy WiFi unit shipped by UQ and Au is not locked, and will work with normal SIM cards from Docomo 5G at least. Softbank apparently does not work. This means that unlike most other WiMax routers, it should also work overseas with tourist SIM cards.
Settings like the APN and DHCP settings (including DMC) can be changed on the unit itself, or on the management web page. These are already showing up used on Merucari and other secondhand sites for around $200, so they might be a worthwhile upgrade for anyone. I assume they will also work with a UQ WiMax/LTE SIM/Plan. One thing it seemingly can't do, though, is support 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz WiFi at the same time, which the newest UQ 4G WiMax routers can do.
--
Apparently, the UQ press release says that in "Standard Mode", some subset of the 4G/5G network will be available, which means you might not even have to use the cellular network option to get coverage where there is no WiMax service in some cases.
--
One user told me that the newest Docomo 5G plans offer 150GB. Their web site says "unlimited", but I didn't see the 150GB mentioned in the fine print. Those plans cost around $70, though. What's more, the Docomo 5G mobile router is nearly $700!
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