SoftBank’s super-fast 5G network not very useful yet

Bloomberg

SoftBank Corp’s fifth-generation wireless service in Japan is living up to the hype in at least one respect — internet speeds that are blazingly fast even by the standards of one of the most connected countries in the world.
The carrier’s month-old 5G network topped out at 1.1 gigabits per second for downloads and about 30 megabits for uploads in tests carried out by Bloomberg News in Tokyo. Speeds of this kind, far surpassing typical wired broadband connections, have previously been possible only by pushing a fiber optic cable directly into a user’s home. But there are significant pieces still missing and preventing mass adoption: coverage is severely limited for now, there’s little in the way of appealing content to capitalise on all that extra bandwidth and mobile data plans have yet to
be revised to account for the much-increased consumption that 5G portends.
SoftBank and local rivals KDDI Corp and NTT Docomo Inc all launched their 5G offerings late last month in a handful of metropolitan areas around the country, while newcomer Rakuten Inc has targeted June for launch.
The Japanese telcos and their counterparts in South Korea and China have pressed ahead with deployment of next-generation networks despite global coronavirus woes. But 5G services touting high speeds and low latency are still out of reach for the majority of people eager for bandwidth to stream movies and telework as they shelter at home. SoftBank shares were mostly unchanged in morning trading in Tokyo on Tuesday.
The coverage in Japan is still so thin that the three major carriers have all resorted to posting addresses of the exact locations where early adopters can get 5G bars. In Bloomberg’s own limited test of SoftBank’s network, the best reception was inside its store in Tokyo’s posh shopping district of Ginza, and the signal quickly dropped off to nothing about a block away.
While SoftBank plans to expand the service to larger pockets of Tokyo and other big cities later this year, the company doesn’t expect to reach 90% of the population until March 2022 at the latest.
Part of the challenge is that 5G networks have to be more dense than their predecessors. Their signals typically use higher-frequency spectrum, starting with 3.6 gigahertz in Japan, which allows for faster communication speeds at the expense of reach. Building out a 5G network at such frequency necessitates more networking infrastructure to achieve coverage. That’s more of an issue for sprawling places like the US than densely populated Japan, said Kirk Boodry, an analyst at Redex Holdings who writes for Smartkarma. “The coverage is still going to be spotty for a while,” said Boodry.
Even when it can be had, it’s not yet clear what that much bandwidth is actually good for. The handful of augmented and virtual reality experiences that come preinstalled on SoftBank’s 5G phones work just as well with a basic Wi-Fi connection. They lean heavily on teenage idols, letting users view performances by pop bands like AKB48 from multiple angles
or in 3-D.
There’s also an app for streaming basketball games of the recently formed domestic professional league, though all the matches have been cancelled because of the virus outbreak. SoftBank is also launching a cloud gaming service in collaboration with Nvidia.
The carrier, serving as the
reliable revenue stream underpinning Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank Group Corp, is offering its 5G service as an add-on to existing plans for 1,000 yen ($9) per month. Subscribers who sign up by August 31 will get it for free for two years.