To point: I was in Japan for several weeks at the end of 2015. The coverage (served by NTT Docomo) was very good, literally everywhere I tried. This includes

To point: I was in Japan for several weeks at the end of 2015. The coverage (served by NTT Docomo) was very good, literally everywhere I tried. This includes the urban and transit corridors I visited, as well as in somewhat more rural areas in the mountains. My experience with similar areas in the US is that, even in major urban centers, there are black holes of poor service. Even a little bit outside of cities, coverage quickly gets very hit or miss here. Even subway trains and stations had uniformly excellent service. A defining experience: exactly once did I note poor reception on my phone. Zero bars, 4G in a subway station. I was figuring I was SOL for a time. Nope! There wasn't even any additional load latency that I could tell -- web browsing was snappy as ever. I've lost track of the times in the US where I'm at one or two bars, LTE and I've just given up waiting for the bits. This brought about a dawning realization that even the best covered areas in the US are practically rural backwaters compared to Japan's infrastructure, using the same wireless technology generation. Thus I won't point any fingers at the technology. Instead I'll reserve that judgement for the US carriers. :-/