Japan: MIC Consults on Mobile Base Station Licensing Reform

On August 4, 2026, Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) opened a public comment window on draft ministerial ordinances amending the Radio Act Enforcement Regulations and the Radio Station License Procedure Rules. Comments run from August 5 to September 8, 2026 (postmark deadline), implementing the July 10, 2026 first interim report of the Information and Communications Council on mobile phone licensing reform. The draft revises six instruments at once: the two core enforcement and procedure ordinances, a foreign-equivalent technical standards public notice, a radio-station application code notice, a 2.3 to 2.4 GHz and 3.4 to 4.2 GHz interference-area notice, and the Radio Act review standards directive.

The substance is a structural overhaul of how mobile base stations are licensed in Japan, not a routine technical tweak. It introduces a licensing track for portable, satellite-backhauled base stations, consolidates the blanket-license technical standards for RedCap, LTE and NR, expands the Sub6 (3.7 to 4.0 GHz) blanket-license geography to 291 municipalities, and designates 5G multi-sector antenna-power conditions. For the licensing and RAN compliance teams at NTT Docomo, KDDI, SoftBank and Rakuten Mobile, plus portable femtocell, RAN and RedCap IoT equipment vendors selling into Japan, this is the binding-instrument follow-through to the Council's July report and the moment to shape the final text.

Who must act, and by when?

Four mobile network operators and their equipment supply chain must engage now. The comment window closes September 8, 2026, and MIC has stated it will proceed swiftly to the ordinance amendment after reviewing submissions, meaning the drafted technical conditions are close to final. Licensing teams should treat the draft as the operative rulebook for 2027 deployments and comment only where a condition blocks a real deployment scenario, not on general principle.

The consultation is administered by the Mobile Communications Division of the Telecommunications Bureau's Radio Department (03-5253-5893). Documents are on e-Gov's public comment portal. Stakeholders who miss the window will have no further formal input before the ordinance is promulgated in the Kanpo.

What changes for portable and satellite-backhauled base stations?

The draft creates a licensing category for portable base stations that use satellite backhaul, removing the ambiguity that today forces operators into ad hoc per-station approvals for emergency, temporary and rural-coverage deployments. A base station that moves or that depends on a non-terrestrial backhaul link currently fits neither the fixed-station nor the mobile-station licensing track cleanly, which has slowed disaster-response and remote-area rollouts. The new category aligns Japan's licensing architecture with the satellite-to-handset deployments already advancing in the United States and Europe, and it lets MNOs pre-certify a fleet of portable units under a blanket license rather than licensing each site individually. For vendors it also opens a new Giteki conformity path: portable units must meet the technical regulations under this category before shipment, and the Construction Design Certification scope for RAN vendors will need updating. Vendors should map their portable femtocell and transportable RAN portfolios against the draft conditions during the comment window, because the conditions fixed in the final ordinance become the Giteki test basis.

How do Sub6 blanket licenses and RedCap standards change?

The package consolidates the blanket-license technical standards for RedCap (the reduced-capability NR category used for IoT), LTE and NR into a unified framework, which simplifies the conformity certification path for multi-mode cells but also re-anchors the technical baseline every existing certification references. Any equipment certified against the prior, separate standards will need a gap analysis against the consolidated text once it is promulgated.

The Sub6 (3.7 to 4.0 GHz) blanket-license geography expands to 291 municipalities, extending where operators can deploy under a blanket license instead of seeking individual station licenses. This is the licensing unlock for rural and suburban 5G expansion, changing the deployment economics for areas where per-station licensing overhead previously made Sub6 buildout marginal. The 5G multi-sector antenna-power designation, finally, sets the power conditions for cells serving multiple sectors under one license, which matters for dense urban capacity upgrades.

Continuous, per-jurisdiction real-time monitoring surfaces this kind of ministerial-ordinance consultation the moment MIC publishes it, before the comment window closes and before the final text is fixed in the Kanpo.

Take advantage of this real-time watch

What should licensing and RAN teams do now?

First, download the draft ordinance from the MIC press release and the draft amending ordinance (PDF), and run a gap analysis against your current blanket-license portfolio. Second, identify any condition in the portable-station, RedCap or antenna-power provisions that blocks a planned 2026 to 2027 deployment and file a focused comment before September 8. Third, brief your Giteki certification team and your RCB (TELEC, JARD) on the consolidated standard and the new portable category, so conformity test plans update in parallel with promulgation rather than after it. Fourth, track the related July 10 first interim report lineage, since the Council's second report will drive the next amendment wave. Obsidian tracks this docket continuously so the moment MIC promulgates the final ordinance your team has the diff in hand.