Hacker News Reader

Comment by 6t6t6t6 | Hacker News Reader

In Japan (except with some minor providers), your contract is linked to a concrete terminal. If you break your terminal, you must buy a new one from the company that is providing you the service.

Also, if you want to use iPhone, you must get a contract with Softbank.

View on HN

I bought a "visitor SIM" for 2200 yen for 14 days of unlimited data. 4400 yen a month is cheaper than an unlimited data plan in the US, so I don't see why that's not a viable option for residents. Sure, they tell you it's for visitors, but they don't check.

>Concrete terminal?

What do you mean?

>You must get a contract with SoftBank

Why? What do they offer that requires a contract? I'm not doubting you, but everything I can find online is poorly-translated pages that don't tell me much.

I think that they mean that you need a carrier-provided device, rather than bringing your own and popping in a SIM. As for the iPhone SoftBank thing: I'm assuming that they're the only Japanese carrier that provides the iPhone (Wikipedia's page on SoftBank says that starting with the iPhone 4S, it's available through KDDI as well, so maybe the previous commenter's information is out of date?)

SoftBank uses CDMA and LTE. I assume that they use SIM cards for LTE.

AFAIK the only way to get a SoftBank SIM is with a SoftBank phone. I walked into a SoftBank store many years ago and tried to buy a SIM for my phone, they thought it was very cute.

As of the iPhone 5-ish the three major carriers (SoftBank, au, docomo) have all had the iPhone. They are uniformly terrible (onerous contract terms, expensive, low data caps, etc). Their greed has fueled an explosion of free wifi spots, and a resurgence of smaller carriers now that people are getting wise to their BS.

It's not a bad deduction but it is completely wrong. All major carriers in Japan sell iPhone, and all carriers (including many small ones) will sell you a sim card you can insert into your unlocked iPhone that you bought in Japan.

There are similar technical reasons that the U.S. and Japan ended up this way. In both countries carriers used to have different, incompatible mobile network technologies, so phones were naturally locked to a carrier. In Europe and elsewhere, everyone used GSM, then UMTS, then LTE. Today everyone is moving to LTE, but of course the carriers don't want to give up the power they got used to having.

I'm guessing you haven't been to Japan in about 5 years. Everything you said is wrong today.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com