Japan's Ministry of Basically Everything has announced their plans for the 800MHz zone. In short, they're kicking out everything currently using the frequency range to free up room for 3G technologies.

The Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications has announced their plans for a reorganization of the 800MHz band, to allow for greater usage efficiency of EM waves in regards to 3G communcations.

The plans announced this time affect how the 800MHz band, currently used by au's CDMA2000 1x, and NTT DoCoMo's PDC system, will be divided in the future. According to the plans, IMT-2000 (a.k.a 3G) will be be divided into 815 ~ 850MHz and 860 ~ 895MHz zones; however, airport and aircraft wireless phones, as well as emergency wireless phones, also currently use these bands.

Wireless airport phones will be moved to a digital 400MHz band, and will stop using the 800MHz region by May of 2007. Also, airplane phones were abolished in March of this year - emergency wireless phones will move to the 260MHz zone, and will stop using the 800MHz band by May 2011.

While the subscriber count for 3G services from all providers has expanded to 20 million users, there are still 60 million people using PDC systems. In order for the 800MHz region to be divided for 3G, these PDC systems must also change frequencies - but since the cost of moving to a completely different frequency would be quite high, the Ministry will instead dish out frequencies relatively close to o­ne another. For now, the plan for each company is 15MHz x 2, but the Ministry will keep an eye o­n the situation, and if it turns out sour, they will look into dividing up new frequencies.

The Ministry is accepting feedback o­n these newly announced plans until September 6th.

Inspired by:
http://k-tai.impress.co.jp/cda/article/news_toppage/20093.html

Press Release:
http://www.soumu.go.jp/s-news/2004/040806_2.html