SIM-card and pricing
So, you are going to japan and you want to stay connected to the internet, perhaps upload some pictures and short blogposts and Facebook entries to envy your friends at home. How do you do that?”
The cheapest alternative for one 3G simcard in oct’2011 is a rental fee of ¥150/day plus a ¥0.32/data packet. This is a incredibly confusing pricing strategy for foreginers, given that most people don’t even know what a byte is. A data packet is 128 bytes, and 128 bytes is 0.0001221 Megabytes! So a megabyte actually costs you 1/0.0001221 = 8192 times more = 2621 yen/Megabyte! WTF?!
(I have even gone over this calculation multiple times for decimal errors, but the Softbank graphic tells me I’m right.)
So be ware! I have seen several providers giving no real explaination on how much this actually is in normal figures, and seemingly offering no datacap. Luckily, most providers offer some sort of unlimited access. Softbank – has a max price of ¥1500 per day and unlimited usage after the cap. That is not cheap at all, (around 20$/14€) per day, but at least they won’t imprision you for life after a week of periodically checking your mail!
