The impetus for this special issue has been spurred by new technical trends in wireless communication and the need for high bit rate ( 1Gbit/s) services in future wireless systems. However, due to the limited transmit power, the wireless transmission distance cannot be too large if the data rate is very high. In order to have a reasonable coverage area for each cell, antennas that are centrally attached to the base station in conventional mobile systems should be distributed throughout the entire cell via optical fiber links so that the wireless transmission distance between mobile terminals and base station antennas can be shortened. Such a system is called a distributed broadband wireless communications (BWC) system. Two keys to implementing the distributed BWC system are distributed antenna systems (DASs) and radio over fiber (RoF) technologies. For DAS implementation, having the mobiles communicating simultaneously with several remote antennas with perfect coordination between these antennas is significant, while crucial to the use of RoF technologies is having small nonlinear distortion and low time delay. Therefore, distributed BWC is important and timely for the move to future broadband wireless mobile systems. To realize distributed BWC, recent technological developments and advancements have to be incorporated. The goal of this JSAC issue is to bring together research contributions that describe original and unpublished work addressing distributed