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CDMA cellphone subscribers in Japan should see faster upload and download speeds later this year with an upgrade by operator KDDI, the carrier said Tuesday.
KDDI, which uses the “au” brand-name and is number two in the Japanese cellular market, will boost the maximum download speed from 2.4Mbps to 3.6Mbps and the upload speed from 144kbps to 3.1Mbps with the upgrade, it said Tuesday.
The faster data transfer speeds will be available from December this year and will be made possible after KDDI upgrades its current network to CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Rev.A. That lengthy moniker signifies the latest version of the CDMA cellular telephone technology and is a technology also likely to be employed by other CDMA operators around the world.
In addition to faster data transmission the upgrade also brings support for quality-of-service guarantees and services that require low network latency, such as VoIP and video telephony. With the upgrade KDDI plans to offer both these services, it said.
KDDI will use the “Ultra 3G” brand name for the service.
The carrier will also launch a content distribution service based on the BCMCS (broadcast and multicast services) technology from September this year. Using BCMCS it will be able to distribute news and video content to large numbers of users with lower network overheads.
KDDI had 23.9 million subscribers at the end of July, according to figures from the Telecommunication Carriers Association. NTT DoCoMo had 51.9 million subscribers and Vodafone had 15.3 million at the same time.
— Martyn Williams
Yoshi’s take: I’ve said it before, but why do mobile users need that much bandwidth? Seems like progress for its own sake.
05:54 PM 
Mark Hiratsuka •
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