Help with wifi options for semi-longterm use in remote area

Japan Traveller Questions
1

Hello all,
My wife and I have just moved to Japan, and once our quarantine is over we’ll be moving to a remote island in Tokyo Pref. where only Docomo and Softbank are available.

Docomo has the best coverage, Softbank is more spotty.

The issue is that we won’t be staying long in the first house we are renting, maybe a couple of months only, as we will use it to look for a place to settle down.

Meaning we can’t get a fibre connection just now.

We’ve been looking at SIM card and pocket wifi options for a few days haven’t really seen the light.

We are two adults, with 2 smartphones and two computers.

We don’t really need a lot of data on the phones, but it would be good to be able to use instant messaging (line etc) for work.
At home, we’ll need data, regular videocalls, website maintance etc.

Ideally we would like to have either a combination of:

data sim for the phones and pocket wifi at home,

or 2 pocket wifi only that we carry with us.

all the data on the phone’s sim, using the phones as hotspot for the computers ,

However, the prices are really high, especially with the data caps which does not make this seem like a practical option.

We even started looking at AIS’s roaming data plans (since we still have our sim cards from Thailand were we were living and paying less than 10 USD per month for unlimited, uncapped 4G data ) but they’re limited to 20 days.

Is there anyway to keep things in the 5/6K JPY per month zone and have enough monthly data for two computers, or are we doomed?

We could do with data on one phone only.

ps. we both read/write Japanese, so don’t need English customer service.

Thanks a bunch

b

2

One thing we’ve been looking into are these cards:

weird sim card sold on amazon

This one is supposed to used docomo’s network for data (which is great), and it’s priced at 2380 JPY for 10G of data for 180 days (cuts when 10 gigs is reached or after 180 days), which could be a good option. Pay 4760 JPY once, and we can use line messaging for 180 days on both phones, good for work.

Still leaves the issue of internet at home when you can’t get fiber.

Pocket wifi is about 7000 to 6000 JPY per month for 100 or 90 Gigs using softbank - which means a 3 gig per day cap, but I guess we can work with that if we’re careful. Let’s hope softbank works well where our first house is…

Any other ideas?

3

Please look into IIJmio. We have a family plan with some 10 GB/month and three SIM cards. Two of them with voice and one with data only. Voice costs 30 JPY per minute on top but we try to use Messenger Skype Out. A bit expensive but we don’t make a lot of phonecalls. There is also an option to have phone calls included.

They sit on top of Docomo (or AU, your choice). You must obviously check whether the service works on your island.

We are happy with the service and you can tailor the service to your needs if you need more SIMs or data. We pay about 5,000 per month. You can buy SIMs online directly from IIJmio or at BicCamera or Yodobashi Camera.

Hope this helps.

4

Yes it does, thank you very much! I’ll look into it.
At the moment we’re going for a sim card on OCN, that uses the docomo network, sim is 700 JPY per month with 1Gig of data, so enough for instant messaging, and we get free phones, so that’s sorted.

Main issue is internet at home when you can’t get a fiber connection. We decided to go with the Mobal router, which has 100 Gigs a month on Docomo or Softbank, but not sure how that will work with Docomo’s reputedly strict data capping…

Last time we had a data cap was in Indonesia, and we were tethering one laptop on our phones, I think we were using 3Gigs a day (remember blowing the Telkomsel SIM data package a few times) - issue is that we now have 2 laptops, so 100 gigs is going to be tight…

We’ll see how it goes.

thanks

b