KDDI announced that it would start deploying LTE and is looking to complete the deploymenr by 2012. The contract was awarded to Motorola and NEC a few days ago.The deal includes base stations from Japan's NEC and although the announcement gave no idea of the breakdown of the orders, but most analysts seem to think that Motorola will get the lion's share of the order.
KDDI's network is a full two years behind that of NTT DoCoMo. The news lifted KDDI's stock, which had previously not made its LTE schedule clear as it is also a major investor in Japanese mobile WiMAX with UQ Communication which has an aggressive WIMAX rollout schedule. The operator has set itself a target of more than 90% population coverage nationwide by the end of March 2010. By that time, UQ says it will have 1,161 cities covered through 38,000 base stations, which includes 19,000 femtocells.
KDDI will deploy its LTE network in both 1.5GHz and 800MHz bands and will conduct LTE trials in mid 2010.
At the LTE World Summit in London in Novmber 2008, the KDDI speaker was very unclear about its strategy when he said that they would be deploying both LTE and WiMAX networks and left the audience feeling very confused. KDDI is clearly not putting all its eggs in the LTE basket, but why the need for the two networks, no one is sure either.
