Rakuten launches full-scale mobile phone service

Rakuten Mobile Inc on Wednesday announced the full-scale commercial launch of its mobile carrier service. Alongside this announcement, the company also unveiled the Rakuten UN-LIMIT 2.0 plan, its unlimited mobile service plan available for the monthly fee of 2,980 yen.

In light of growing data demands spurred by the recent expansion of telework and online education needs, the upgraded Rakuten UN-LIMIT 2.0 plan offers customers 5GB of data per month when roaming in domestic partner areas and increases the maximum data transmission speed in these partner areas after using up the allocated 5GB to 1Mbps. Compared to the 2GB of domestic partner area data roaming and maximum 128kbps offered by the previous version of the Rakuten UN-LIMIT plan, this increase is designed to better serve customers and meet the growing demand for mobile services. The maximum 1Mbps data speed after the allotted roaming data is used up will be available from April 8, with the 5GB of roaming data becoming available from April 22, for all Rakuten UN-LIMIT customers.

The Rakuten UN-LIMIT service plan offers customers unlimited data use within Rakuten network areas and unlimited domestic calls with Rakuten Link, the communication app developed by Rakuten, for a monthly fee of 2,980 yen (1), (2). Advance applications for the service plan began on March 3, with full-scale service launching on April 8, 2020 (3). A campaign is also underway offering 3 million customers who sign up for the program the first year of service free of charge (4).

Rakuten Inc. CEO Hiroshi Mikitani said: “Japan is the first country in the world to offer a mobile service through a fully virtualized mobile network. By offering significant savings to our customers with a low-priced and convenient service, we aim to reduce the household cost of mobile services and encourage consumer spending, contributing to the overall health of Japan’s national economy.”

• Unlimited when connected to Rakuten Mobile’s base stations. Subscribers can confirm which area the data they are using is from via the My Rakuten Mobile home screen.
• Calls to connecting services from other companies that start with numbers such as 0180 or 0570, as well as some calls to 188 special numbers will incur charges.
• Limited to one contract and one application per customer. The number of eligible customers may change depending on the number of applications.

―Japan Today