Japan has approved five applicants to take part in an auction of spectrum in the 26 GHz band, clearing the way for a new round of millimetre-wave 5G licensing in one of Asia's most developed mobile markets.

The approvals, reported by Telecompaper, confirm that five companies passed the regulator's vetting process and will now compete for licences in the band. The 26 GHz range sits at the heart of the millimetre-wave portion of the 5G portfolio, where wide channel bandwidths allow operators to deliver multi-gigabit throughput over short distances.

Japan has been an early mover in millimetre-wave 5G. Its regulators assigned initial 28 GHz licences back in 2019, and the extension of high-band assignments to the 26 GHz range follows the same policy logic: dense urban capacity, fixed wireless access and enterprise deployments where fibre is impractical or expensive.

The auction format itself marks a shift for Japan. The country historically assigned spectrum through administrative allocation rather than competitive bidding, and its first真正的 competitive spectrum auction only took place in late 2023, when the government sold low-band 700 MHz and 3.7 GHz licences. The 26 GHz process now adds another band to the country's still-young auction framework.

Globally, the 26 GHz band has seen uneven uptake. Operators in the United States and Japan moved early on millimetre-wave deployments, while most European and Asian operators concentrated first on mid-band spectrum, which offers a more workable balance between coverage and capacity. The physics constrains high-band 5G: signals at 26 GHz propagate over hundreds of metres rather than kilometres and suffer significant attenuation through walls, so licensees typically deploy the band as a capacity overlay on top of nationwide mid-band networks.

For the five approved applicants, the immediate stakes are access to large contiguous blocks of spectrum at a moment when traffic growth keeps pressing on urban network capacity. The identities of the bidders and the reserve prices attached to the lots were not disclosed in the report.

The auction will now proceed to the bidding stage, with licences expected to translate into commercial millimetre-wave deployments in the years following assignment.