About a year has passed since Japan’s first commercial 5G mobile communications service was launched. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications has announced a target of increasing the number of base stations to 280,000 by the end of March 2024 and is promoting further development of the communications infrastructure.
Tests are underway to verify remote control and remote medical care, which 5G is expected to make possible, and use of the technology is steadily growing.
On the other hand, Yasuhiko Taniwaki, vice minister for policy coordination at the ministry, points out that Japan has many hurdles to overcome in areas ranging from cybersecurity to the nurturing of IT human resources. In an interview with The Japan Times, Taniwaki discussed the status of 5G in Japan and the concept of “Beyond 5G.”
“In Japan, about 99% of households are under the coverage of fiber-optic links, which makes it one of the leading countries in the world. The ratio for 4G service coverage has reached 99%, and the number of people residing in areas not covered by the network has declined to 13,000,” Taniwaki said. “You can speed up the development of 5G infrastructure by using the 4G infrastructure, that is to say, by replacing 4G base stations with 5G base stations. So Japan has a developed fiber-optic infrastructure and a high 4G service coverage ratio, which gives it an advantage over other countries in terms of developing a 5G network.’’
The ministry’s goal is to have base stations installed in half of its grid of 4,500 10 km-by-10 km cells covering the nation. It initially aimed to have 70,000 base stations by the end of March 2024, but quadrupled that to 280,000 in the same time frame in the “Master Plan 3.0 on the Regional Development of ICT Infrastructure” that the ministry released ..
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