Softbank Awarded Spectrum Made Available By Japan’s Switch to Digital TV

Softbank in Roppongi, Tokyo

Softbank Mobile Corp. announced on its website today that it has been approved by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications to proceed with its proposed base station plan for the 900MHz band of wireless spectrum.

This band became available thanks to Japan’s switch to digital TV last year, as it was previously in use by the analog system. What’s interesting though is that the band wasn’t auctioned off by the Ministry, but rather awarded to Softbank after its proposal was submitted last month. The company elaborated on its plan:

The purpose of this application was to cope with the dramatic increase of traffic, enhance coverage, and build a robust disaster-proof communication network… The approved base station plan incorporates the installation of approximately 16,000 base stations in fiscal 2012, to be expanded up to 41,000 by fiscal 2016, providing 99.9 percent population coverage.

The services using the 900MHz band are on course to launch on July 25 of this year. Among the compatible devices for these services are Apple’s iPhone and iPad, as well as Softbank’s (TSE:9984) coming summer lineup of handsets.

It’s certainly good news for Softbank and its customers, because in addition to the afore-mentioned necessity of disaster preparedness, there is also the problem of dramatically increased data consumption. Both Docomo and KDDI have experienced outages in recent months, the former citing data hungry VoIP applications as one possible cause. With regards to disaster preparedness, Docomo announced a list of measures it would be taking, in the wake of lessons learned from last year’s earthquake in March.