UQ Communications was founded during August 2007 by several major companies in Japan to acquire a 2.5GHz license and launch Mobile WiMAX services. KDDI owns 32.26% of the company, followed by Intel, East Japan Railway, Kyocera, Daiwa Securities and the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi. UQ Communications has been founded with a combined capital of 17 billion Yen.
UQ Communications is a new company that says it is expanding its employee count to be able to maintain its aggressive wimax rollout plan. It’s majority shareholder KDDI is Japan’s second-largest mobile operator, with more than 15,000 employees and revenues of Yen3.6 trillion in the year ended March 2008. UQ Communications has received a licence for 30MHz of spectrum at 2.5GHz for a nationwide rollout during December 2007. Having received the only mobile WiMAX licence in Japan, UQ Communications is obliged to launch a service three years after the licence has been awarded, and provide 10% and 50% population coverage within 3 and 5 years respectively. UQ Communications will also be obliged to open up its network for third party service providers acting as MVNOs. There is increasing interest from potential MVNOs and that it is in discussion with several companies in the field.
As of July 2008, UQ Communications has not yet announced the number of installed base stations, but the company hopes to officially launch its 802.16e-2005 services during July 2009, after a commercial trial starting February 2009. The initial rollout will take place in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya, covering 50% of the Japanese population, and will be followed by a nationwide rollout to cover 85% of the population by the end of 2011. The operator will then extend its coverage to fill-in blackspots by 2013.
Speaking at the WiMax Forum Congress Asia event held in Singapore, Takeshi Tanaka – president of UQ Communications – unveiled UQ’s upcoming wimax roll out plan in April 2009. He also criticized the existing 3g cellular internet capacity and the high early termination fees levied by mobile operators on customers wishing to exit their two-year 3G contracts. UQ has been achieving up to 16Mbps on the downlink and up to 3.9Mbps on the uplink since free trials of the wimax service began in February 2009. The trials are taking place in Tokyo, Yokohama and Kawasaki using 600 Samsung base stations. UQ is the first major mobile WiMAX operator to use FFR (fraactional frequency reuse), which can improve overall spectrum efficiency by 85% compared with a typical ‘3-frequency’ operation.
By the end of June 2009, UQ aims to extend WiMAX coverage to Nagoya and Osaka, taking the number of deployed base stations up to 1,600. Antennas will also be located in 44 railway stations in metropolitan areas. As of 31 March 2010 UQ said the company will have deployed 4,000 WiMAX base stations and have around 300,000 subscribers. UQ is rolling out wimax aggressively to achieve more than 90 percent population coverage across Japan by the end of FY 2012.
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