Japan’s Race to Achieve 5G

The Internet. Japan’s technological advancements have started in the late 1950s, and when its futuristic progress reached 2010, it grasped the idea of achieving 5G internet speed. 5G is quadruple the rate of your 4G mobile data. If you can download a 1-hour movie for 2-3 hours using 4G, it would only take a few minutes with 5G. But for Japan to do this, it needs to expand its reaches within the worldwide web ( WWW). The world is connected through an invisible, high-tech avenue of data and information that can reach your device or browser in just a nanosecond. That is the same scale the neurons in your brain travel to transmit data from one part of your body to another—back and forth. For you to react to a painful experience or physical trauma (i.e., burns), it takes a couple of milliseconds—which is ten thousand times slower than a nanosecond. Keeping it simple, when you search for an online casino, you would have to quickly look for the best results that fit your interests immediately. Now that Japan and other countries in the world of technology are adapting to 5G internet speed, it would be easier for you to participate in fun, relaxing, and satisfying online sweepstakes. That would be the best way to enjoy the privileges technology gives us. 

Japan is the first country to initiate 5G internet speed research long before the United States and Europe introduced 4G. The 5G race has been highly focused only on the United States, China and the European Union. However, Japan has shown its capabilities as it surprised these three mega-technological countries that Japan also has the upper hand in achieving 5G. Why is 5G so crucial for these countries? The more a nation holds wider bandwidth and control over the world’s internet, the more powerful technological advancements can become its interests. Such achievement can also help international organisations to catch cybercriminals and topple other cybercrimes. Japan’s milestone in achieving 5G internet speed provides a wake-up call for China and the West that Tokyo can also compete in technological races.

Japan has a different approach in the deployment procedures and prioritisation of 5G deployment. First, it allocates frequencies more organised and systematic than the typical strategies of China and the United States. Second, Japan creates and ensures a safe space for all gadget and internet consumers through its national industry solutions and policy options. These options are indirectly targeted against China’s Huawei, covered with various controversies regarding unsafe user policies and blatant abrogations of data privacy rights. Lastly, Japan does not brag about it—keeping the purpose for improving the internet experience of its citizens solely.

Unlike European countries, Japan does not privatize frequencies. The Ministry of the Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) has assigned frequencies to four operators for free in April 2019: NTT Docomo, KDDI, Softbank and Rakuten. As in many countries, the assignment of frequencies is accompanied by coverage obligations. The largest operators NTT Docomo and KDDI accepted coverage of more than 90% of the Japanese population, while SoftBank and Rakuten promised coverage of 64% and 56% respectively. This is the inevitable result of the free allocation of frequencies, which allows operators to adopt different investment strategies without having to pay the country billions of dollars like Germany or Italy. In addition, MIC also listed 13 conditions that operators should promise to meet in order to get free frequencies. These include security responsibilities, such as “the obligation to take appropriate cybersecurity measures to manage the equipment supply chain.” This agreement between 4,444 operators and the government makes it easier for Japan to focus on equipment solutions without having to manage high-risk suppliers. Regarding Huawei, Japan is politely enforcing the de facto ban, not even using the term. This approach is different from the US policy in that it avoids open confrontation with China. 

 Therefore, Japanese telecom operators are usually not troubled by the routing dependency restrictions that many European telecom companies may experience in the first stage of non-autonomous 5G deployment. This is basically an upgrade of the existing 4G core and network radio access.