Wi-Fi WIN

» see au.kddi.com/service/kino/wifi/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In 2009 a Japanese feature phone could be made to talk to the internet over the wireless router in your living room, and from 2011 KDDI charged 525 yen a month for the privilege of letting it. The radio was already inside the handset. What the money bought was permission to switch it on.

KDDI and Okinawa Cellular announced Wi-Fi WIN on 25 May 2009 and started it on the day its one compatible handset went on sale: the Toshiba-built biblio, 19 June 2009, a day later in Kanto. biblio was the only au summer model that year with a wireless LAN chip in it. Across the next two years the compatibility list reached fourteen handsets from five makers, and then it stopped growing. The Toshiba REGZA Phone T007 was the last au handset ever built that could use the service.

The pitch was packet charges. Traffic over wireless LAN cost nothing, which mattered on a Japanese feature phone in 2009, because EZweb billed by the packet and a downloaded video could run up a bill quickly. KDDI stood up a dedicated Wi-Fi WIN gateway out on the public internet and routed EZweb through it, so a handset sitting on a home access point could reach the walled garden from outside the wall. No standards body had anything to do with this. KDDI built a box and pointed the phones at it.

None of this could have existed anywhere but Japan. EZweb was a carrier's private network reached by a handset that carrier had approved, and Wi-Fi WIN was a second private door into the same garden. I have only the releases to go on, and the thing I keep returning to in them is that the whole apparatus, the gateway and the compatibility list, existed so a phone could do over a router what it could already do over the air.

~ the case file ~

~ what the five hundred yen bought ~

The eligibility rules are where it turns peculiar. To subscribe you had to already hold an EZ WIN course and a packet flat-rate or packet discount plan. The 525 yen a month therefore bought free packets on top of a contract whose packets were already capped at a fixed monthly ceiling. And without the subscription the wireless LAN was inert: KDDI's own documentation says that setting up wireless LAN on the handset without contracting the service left you unable to browse. The fee did not pay for bandwidth. It paid for permission.

It was free for the first two years by design, and KDDI explained that on launch day in so many words. A free period of only a month would leave anyone who bought a compatible handset later feeling hard done by, so they made it two years. Charging began on 1 July 2011 at 525 yen, which was 500 yen plus the consumption tax then in force.

Some of the fourteen compatible handsets had no wireless LAN radio of their own. For those, from 11 June 2010, KDDI sold the au Wi-Fi WIN Card: a 4,200 yen microSDIO card built by Mitsumi around an Atheros chip, 11 by 16 by 0.7 millimeters and under a gram, which KDDI announced as the world's smallest wireless LAN card and Japan's first in a microSD form factor. It held no storage of its own, and while it sat in the slot the handset had no memory card. You bought the card and gave up your microSD slot, and the 525 yen was charged on top of that.

~ the one thing it would not do ~

It would not make a phone call. The question was put to KDDI on launch day and the answer was flat: there is no function to turn the handset into an IP phone. Data only, for the whole five years.

That answer reads differently next to docomo's Home U, which had launched earlier and did the opposite thing. Home U ran an IP Centrex setup that turned the handset into a real IP phone, with free calls between Home U users, but it worked only on the single FLET'S line and the single approved access point you had registered. Wi-Fi WIN worked on any access point on any broadband line and would not carry your voice. Home U died on 31 August 2012, and Wi-Fi WIN outlived it by twenty-two months.

Handover did not exist either. au said so on its own service page: a session running over the cellular network would not move onto wireless LAN, and walking out of range cut the connection outright. The handset went looking for access points once every ten minutes. GPS was disabled whenever Wi-Fi WIN was in use. Public hotspots mostly failed at launch, because the handset's wireless stack handled network names and WEP or WPA but not web-page authentication, so only a network that asked for no login at all, like FREESPOT, would let it through. Impress reported on launch day that the handset moved between the two networks without a break. KDDI's own page said the opposite, and the operator's page is the one that counts.

~ a notice with no reason ~

KDDI and Okinawa Cellular announced the end on 18 October 2013. New subscriptions stopped on 11 November 2013 and the service finished on 30 June 2014. Remaining contracts were canceled automatically from 1 July. The release gives those dates and nothing else. No reason appears anywhere in it.

A reason exists secondhand. Impress wrote the same afternoon that KDDI was ending the service because au feature phone users were falling away as smartphones spread, and wrote it with the Japanese construction that marks reported speech rather than a quotation. KDDI never published a subscriber figure for Wi-Fi WIN at any point across the five years, so there is no way to say how many people were paying 525 yen a month to use a radio they already owned.

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