Japan Monthly Pocket WiFi: Long-Term Rental Plans Explained

Around the third month of living in Japan, the maths changes. A daily WiFi rental that felt cheap for a two-week holiday has quietly turned into one of your larger monthly bills, and the airport SIM you topped up on arrival has run out of headroom. At that point you are no longer a traveller looking for data — you are a resident looking for a phone bill. This guide explains how CDJapan Rental’s monthly pocket WiFi plans work: the three plans, what each one actually costs, and the billing rules that catch people out.

Why a monthly plan instead of a daily rental

Daily rentals are priced for tourists. You pay per day, you get the device for a fixed window, and the per-day rate is set on the assumption that the router comes back in a fortnight. That model is fine for a holiday and expensive for a semester.

Monthly plans invert the trade. You commit to a minimum contract length — three, six, or twelve months — and in exchange the rate drops well below what the same device would cost you day by day. On the cheapest tier, unlimited data works out at roughly ¥180 a day, which is the sort of number that stops feeling like a rental and starts feeling like a utility.

The catch is that a subscription behaves like a subscription. It renews on its own, it bills on a fixed date, and leaving early costs money. Those rules are covered further down, and they are the part worth reading twice.

The three long-term plans

CDJapan Rental offers three monthly pocket WiFi plans. Two are unlimited and differ by network; the third is a capped SoftBank plan that trades data ceiling for a lower price. All three ship the same way and follow the same billing rules — the choice really comes down to network, router, and how much data you burn.

Speeds are best-effort maximums, not what you will see on a crowded train platform. 5G coverage is still uneven outside major urban areas, so the WiMAX router will fall back to 4G in plenty of places.

What it costs

Every plan is priced per month, and the monthly rate falls as the minimum contract period gets longer. The twelve-month tier is roughly 17 percent cheaper than the three-month tier on the unlimited plans, and about 22 percent cheaper on the 100GB plan.

Prices include tax and are checked against the CDJapan Rental plan pages; confirm the current rate at checkout before you order.

The temptation is to reach for the cheapest column. Resist it unless your visa outlasts the contract. A twelve-month commitment broken at month five costs you the remaining discount plus a cancellation fee, and a working holiday that ends early is exactly the scenario that turns the bargain tier into the expensive one. If your departure date is genuinely uncertain, the six-month tier is the honest middle.

The two routers, side by side

The unlimited WiMAX plan ships a different piece of hardware from the two SoftBank plans, and the gap between them is wider than the price difference suggests — particularly if more than one person will be leaning on the connection.

The X11 is the better router on paper and the better router in a shared flat: sixteen connected devices is enough for two people with phones, laptops, a tablet, and a console, whereas five gets tight the moment a flatmate joins. The FS030W is smaller, lighter, and pocket-shaped in a way the X11 is not, and SoftBank’s 4G footprint is the more forgiving of the two once you leave the big cities. Both quote roughly eight hours of battery, which in practice means charging it overnight like a second phone.

If you are unsure how much data you actually consume in a month, our note on how much data streaming and social apps eat per hour is a quicker way to answer that than guessing.

How the billing actually works

This is the part that differs most from a holiday rental, and the part most worth understanding before you order.

Billing runs on the calendar, not on your start date. Your card is charged around the 1st of each month, automatically, for that month’s fee. Credit and debit cards issued outside Japan are accepted, which matters if you arrive before your Japanese bank account exists.

The minimum contract period is a floor, not a ceiling. When your three, six, or twelve months are up, the plan does not stop — it keeps billing monthly until you cancel it. That is convenient if your stay extends and costly if you forget.

Cancelling, and the 20th of the month

Cancellation is submitted through MyPage, and the date you submit it decides which month you stop paying for.

So if you are flying home on the 25th, submit the cancellation before the 20th — not on your last day. Cancelling inside the minimum contract period is allowed, but it triggers a cancellation fee equal to one month’s rate, on top of whatever you have already paid.

Getting it, and sending it back

Order at least three days before the date you want the device. Delivery goes to a Japanese address — a hotel, a share house, a school — or to an airport post office for collection when you land, which is the usual choice for people arriving with no address yet. If you cannot make the pickup window, the package can be transferred rather than sent back.

If you are collecting on arrival, it is worth knowing where the counters and post offices actually are before you clear customs; our guide to WiFi and SIM pickup at Narita, Haneda, Kansai and Fukuoka covers the terminal layouts. On the way out, the return envelope goes into a postbox, and where to find postboxes inside Japanese airports is a more useful thing to know at 6am than it sounds.

Which plan to pick

If you are sharing one connection across a household, or you work from home and treat the router as your broadband, take WiMAX+5G Unlimited. The sixteen-device ceiling and the 5G fallback are what you are paying the extra for, and in Tokyo, Osaka, or Nagoya you will see the benefit.

If you move around the country a lot — regional postings, fieldwork, weekends in prefectures with one train line — SoftBank Unlimited is the safer bet at the same price. It is slower on paper and steadier in the places where 5G maps run out.

If it is just you and a phone, with a laptop in the evenings, SoftBank 100GB saves you around ¥900 to ¥1,000 a month against the unlimited tiers. A hundred gigabytes is a lot of navigation and messaging; it is not a lot of 4K streaming, and hitting the cap drops you to 256 Kbps until the month rolls over, which is slow enough to be genuinely annoying.

Still weighing a router against a SIM or an eSIM in the first place? Start with our comparison of pocket WiFi, eSIM and SIM cards in Japan, then come back here once you know a monthly router is what you want.

Common questions