[gregsadetsky]

Those are dreamy! But also, Japan has incredible density.

I was imagining a no-support, pure esim play. I mean. Even calling it brainstorming is an exaggeration haha

[kalleboo]

Density has it's own costs, finding real estate and backhaul for towers in a city is much harder than picking up some farmland for cheap and slapping up microwave backhaul.

What Japan did was make it extremely easy to start an MVNO - the regulator essentially forced the telcos to allow it, so there are standard contracts with published rates.

The downside is the way the pricing was done is pretty dumb, MVNOs pay by the megabit for a fixed uplink capacity. So during the noon rush where everyone wants to watch YouTube while eating lunch all the MVNO performance, even somewhere the towers are idle, goes to crap, since they only bought uplink for the 98% case.