Intel is furthering its investment in UQ Communications, a Japanese-based WiMAX service provider, with a $43 million cash injection. The money from the company’s investment arm, Intel Capital , will help to fund UQ\'s goal of covering 90 percent of the country by 2012 with the wireless broadband technology; and comes just ahead of the official commercial launch next month. The service offers download speeds up to 40Mbps and uploads up to 10Mbps.

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Are those speeds even competitive in the Japanese market?

Go get that stuff up in places where wired internet is hard and expensive to spread around... like large land mass nations such as The U.S. or Russia.

(shrugs) Those are pretty generic speeds where I live - Seattle. Don't believe it's too much different in Japan. Guess it really depends on your needs whether for business or recreation.

But you bring up a good point in rural areas like the northern steppes of Russia or China.

I don't know about Japan but an alternative to DSL or Cable in an area where there isn't much choice between getting hosed by 2 companies would be healthy economically, and make a lot of disgruntled and irate customers (like me) pretty happy.