WiMax interest soars in Japan

Japan's market for high-speed wide area wireless WiMax is rapidly growing

Motorola and Softbank today revealed plans to test a WiMax wide area wireless networking service in Tokyo.

The two companies are the latest to join Japan's rapidly growing WiMax sector, in which at least four trials have been announced or are underway.

Motorola will provide a complete trial system including access points, a back-end access network, and prototype WiMax mobile handheld devices.

Softbank will use this to measure the effectiveness of WiMax as a wireless broadband technology.

The company will assess range, throughput and ability to seamlessly hand over mobile connections between WiMax base stations and other wireless protocols. The five-month trial will begin in September.

WiMax provides wireless internet access in a similar manner to Wi-Fi, but over a wider area and at higher speeds.

According to NTT DoCoMo, WiMax can cover an area of up to 50km in radius with a single base station, and offers data rates as high as 75Mbps.

Performance in early trials suggests that actual WiMax performance will fall below these targets, but will still be far superior to Wi-Fi. Motorola plans to use multi-antenna WiMax access points to boost performance closer to theoretical limits.

Softbank operates a five million subscriber broadband internet service in cooperation with Yahoo Japan.

Earlier this year, the company acquired Vodafone's ailing Japanese mobile operation, turning itself into the country's third largest mobile operator with 26 million customers.

In announcing a WiMax trial, Softbank joins local mobile service competitors NTT DoCoMo and KDDI.