From B-Mobile's promo page for the new SIM card
A Nikkei report on Monday claimed that Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) was about to sell prepaid 500 MB SIM cards in Japan. And today those cards are now available on Amazon Japan for 1980 yen per month (or about $25).
According to my understanding, users must make an initial ‘sim package’ purchase of 3,150 yen, and then once they use up their 500 MB, they can purchase an additional 500 MB for another 1,980 yen via credit card, which would be a total of 3,960 yen (or $50) for that month.
The data that you don’t use each month is not carried over to the following month. Frankly, that seems really crappy to me. It would be nice to pay for what you use, not more than what you actually use. But mobile companies in Japan have always been good at milking cash from consumers (with the highest mobile ARPU in the world), so this is par for the course in my opinion. Thankfully the service will notify you via email when you are down to your last 100 MB.
It’s officially a B-Mobile 4G/LTE card (available as a standard SIM and as a micro SIM). It’s LTE enabled and will use Docomo’s network. According to B-Mobile, the card will be used for data only, and will not support voice calls, SMS, or MMS. Nikkei reported previously that these cards will be able to function in Docomo’s mobile devices, in addition to compatible foreign handsets such as the iPhone.
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