au, a cell operator in Japan, recently launched their EV-DO-based WIN service in Japan’s major metro areas. The service offers 2.4mbit/sec downstream and 144kbit/sec upstream, making it quite a bit faster than DoCoMo’s competing FOMA service. Outside of the 2.4mbit/sec service area, service falls back to 144/144 or 64/64, if you are really in the boonies.
With the help of a friend, I went to pick one of these cards up on Monday, but unfortunately even the main au store did not have them in stock. I placed my order and then went back to pick up the card on Thursday.
The only PC card available for WIN is Kyocera’s W01K. It is a standard PC card with a small built-in antenna and ports for an included external antenna. It is recognized as a standard serial modem by Windows and does not require any extra drivers to install.
The service is definitely peppy! I have seen downloads of up to 700kbit/sec of uncompressible data, which approaches SDSL speeds. Even more importantly, the latency is very good for a cell-based wireless network. Average round-trip times to the first hop hover around 150ms. Round-trip back to San Jose, using the au’s Internet service, is around 275ms. As long as you have decent signal, the jitter is low as well.
The only downside is the price. Billing is done on a per-packet basis. The base package, at 1500 yen (about $14), does not include any data allowance at all. Transport is .1 yen per packet and I have a sneaking suspicion that the packet size is 128 bytes (although ICMP pings are only getting fragmented above a very Ethernet-esque 1472, I suspect that reassembly is occurring provider-side before the packet is injected into the Internet). You can buy bulk plans, however, and I picked up 500k packets for 7500 yen ($70) per month. This brings the per-packet charge down to $.015 yen per packet, which is better, but still quite pricey for any kind of bulk transport.
All in all, though, a necessity for any connectivity addict in Japan.
