Massive MIMO has gone from being treated like something from Star Trek to being an accepted element of most companies’ 5G roadmaps. While the vendors are busily demonstrating huge antenna arrays to improve wireless capacity and efficiency, especially in a Cloud-RAN scenario, Softbank of Japan is among the select band of operators which is already planning a deployment. As so often in Japan, the operators pay the price of a non-standardized, hand-crafted and therefore expensive roll-out in order to push their networks to the limit and influence the whole ecosystem. Softbank and its affiliate company, Wireless City Planning, claim to be first off the blocks with commercial Massive MIMO and will deploy this initially across 100 macro base stations as…