Kansai airport to offer prepaid data SIM cards for foreigners

Above, the Docomo Tower in Tokyo from Harajuku. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

OSAKA, April 15, Kyodo

Osaka's Kansai International Airport will offer prepaid data SIM cards for foreign travelers through vending machines installed on the international arrival floor from April 22, the airport operator said Monday.

After inserting the card into a smartphone or a tablet device, the user will have access to NTT Docomo Inc.'s LTE high-speed data network.

Sold by So-net Corp., a unit of Sony Corp., the cards are available in two varieties -- 3,000 yen for 100 megabytes of data and 5,000 yen for 500 MB. The prices are inclusive of the consumption tax.

So-net says it offers user support in English and Japanese over the phone, in addition to multilingual information on its website (http://www.so-net.ne.jp/prepaid/en/index.html) that is also available in Chinese.

==Kyodo