Finally, Japan started to feel the pain of mobile data

The news of DoCoMo data service outage is much hyped in Japan. On January 25, eastern half of Tokyo Metropolitan Area suffered from the outage for almost 5 hours, due to an increased signaling traffic caused by Android phones, combined with DoCoMo's "miscalculation" of traffic in switching over to a new network equipment (uhh... really??). DoCoMo's executives, including President and CEO Takamochi Yamada getting 20% pay cut for 3 months. The carrier is adding tens of billions of yens in their network investment due to this incident.

Ouch!

Yes, they are finally feeling the real pain. Smartphone user number is still much smaller in Japan compared to the U.S., and they are still learning how to cope with it.

The problem has been well acknowledged in the US for the past several years, and AT&T+Ericsson team has been working very hard on this issue. So I was thinking that Japanese major carriers are well prepared for it, but I guess not. I am not quite sure what EXACTLY happened, and I still have a slight doubt that they are sorta expecting this and are getting prepared for rate increase by hyping it up...

As a separate matter, there was a huge problem in so-called "sp-mode", DoCoMo version of IP-based SNS service earlier in the month, and KDDI is suffered from a smaller network problem unrelated to smartphone issues.

Tough times for carriers, for sure.

Related article (Japanese)

My article on SOPA

I have a monthly column on Nikkei Business Online (Japanese), and a new article got just uploaded. It is about SOPA, and "California Civil War" between Silicon Valley and Hollywood.

One aspect of SOPA is the new type of "trade friction" against overseas pirate sites, and it became a political issue because it relates to jobs. I explained the basic facts about the debate, about Hollywood's position ("protect media workers' jobs") and Silicon Valley's position ("but it is too much for us, and it does not work").

The heart of the matter is that Hollywood is now aggressively trying to establish a system to harvest enough money from online video/music business, and that money gets distributed among many people in guild/union of media workers. In contrast, I think that Silicon Valley does not have a convincing system of distributing wealth among many people (not just top nerds but all the way to regular middle class workers).

It will take some time till we can establish such system... or can we??

Smartphones' share now is 50% in Japan, but still Galapagos

Smartphone shipment among total mobile handset in Japan during the first half of this fiscal year (Apr-Sep) reaches 49.5%, according to MM Soken.

WirelessWire News 11/30

Sharp keeps the top position (19.4%) in brand share, followed by Fujitsu (16.7%), SonyEricsson (12.8%), Panasonic (10.3%), Apple (9.3%), NEC Casio (8.8%), Kyocera (7.8%), and others.

Compared to the same period last year;

winners:  Fujitsu (last year: 14.9%), SonyEricsson (7.4%), Apple (7.9%)

losers:  Sharp (22.7%), Panasonic (13.6%), NEC Casio (12.1%), Kyocera (11.4%)

These Japanese vendors make their own versions of smartphones matched to the Japanese carriers' specifications.  The old-type "very high in function but only used in Japan" feature phones are widely known as "gala-kei" (Galapagos Keitai/mobile handset), and now these "very high in function but only used in Japan" smartphones are currently called "gala-sma" (Galapagos smartphone).  Despite the popularity of smartphones (iPhone/Android), Japan is still Galapagos in this department.

Michi

Another flash of thought from CTIA, about Sprint

I guess many people think Sprint is likely to be acquired or evaporate, and many people also think AT&T acquiring Tmobile is a bad thing for competition - in the same line of thought.

I don't think so. 

If AT&T and Tmobile remain independent, only Verizon will be the sure winner.  Neither AT&T nor Tmobile will be able to challenge VZ in any significant manner.

In 3G world, 2xGSM and 2xCDMA foursome was a good balance.  Now they will all move to LTE, reducing one will not hurt too much.  But just 2 (VZ and ATT) is a bit too lonely for regulators - 3 is a good number.  It is DEFINITELY better for both VZ and ATT to keep Sprint alive, in terms of competition policy.

For them, weak but independent Sprint - neiter alive nor dead - is an ideal 3rd one.  If Sprint faces a serious situation to go under in the future, they probably will help behind the scenes.

Well, I may have been around in carrier world too long - getting too synical, I guess...

A few flash of thought about RIM in CTIA San Diego

RIM could be found nowhere.  There was a HUGE blackberry outage problem all over the world, and nobody talked about it.  Of course, they were not in keynote, had no booth, nobody uttered "Blackberry" in any sessions.  Wow, that is such a change from even a year ago...

I think RIM grew out of their manageable size.  The current outage is probably a sign of lowering moral within the company.  When they were at the top, I think they had to stretch so thin - with their size, they had to continually support OS updates, support many carriers globally, deal with government globally, support enterprise customers with their own sales force, keep up with the young people's trend in consumer market and deal with app developers...

I guess that was too  much.

AT&T-Tmobile blocked..?

Only Verizon wins.  It will further deter the competition, won't it??  Of course, Sprint also will have a breathing room, but not T-mobile.  Mobile industry is a big-boy's game now.

New Episode of "Social Media" Revolution in the War against Nuke Plant

In ancient Japan, or so the folktale goes, there used to be a mountain where old people were taken and abandoned once they reached 60 years of age. Although the practice of obasute was probably more rural legend than actual reality, it is a chilling reminder of the perils of old age in a nation where roughly one-quarter of Japanese are now 60 years old or above.

via globalspin.blogs.time.com

This news has been going around on Twitter world in Japan for some time - a group of retired engineers are getting together and trying to volunteer in the war zone of Fukushima to stop the nuke power plant calamity. I was thinking that although it was such a brave move, Japanese government and TEPCO would be too bureaucratic to allow such an unprecedented grass-roots move to take any realistic effect.

Now, I just heard the news that the group was officially asked to help by the government and TEPCO, negotiating their position, and that they are currently in the process of establishing themselves as NPO.

This is truly amazing. I don't think it is anything unique to Japan - forget about Bushido, it is long gone, but Americans are known for hero-loving and any other countries have enough number of conscious minded people who would do this under such circumstance. But Japanese have been generally shy and are not used to organizing such things in large scale.

I think Internet age made the change. They put up the site and spread the words through Twitter and other social networks. Domestic and international media took it up, and even more people agreed to join in. It created the momentum.

It may help that the leader, Mr. Yastel Yamada, was a left-wing activist as a student in the 1960's. But the tools - net, Twitter and social media - are there to help now.  They don't have to throw the fire bottles against the establishment - Tweets are stronger than bottles.

So, in a totally different angle, I believe it is another case of "social media" revolution, following "Jasmin Revolution" in Tunisia and Egypt.

Here is the link to their official site. The announcement of the government/TEPCO acceptance is only written in Japanese - the meeting was held on May 26, and was announced on 6/3.

http://bouhatsusoshi.jp/english

Michi

Japan telecom recovery - DoCoMo’s new disaster readiness plans

I am at Wireless Japan 2011 in Tokyo right now.  On the first day, CEOs of all wireless carriers are speaking at Keynote, and found that DoCoMo’s Mr. Takashi Yamada’s talk about their disaster readiness plans quite interesting.

As I have been reporting in this blog, DoCoMo has been quickly recovering their damaged service and as of now, service is recovered at most of the affected areas.  One of the remedies that they took was to build small number of backup large zone base stations on high ground, instead of rebuilding each individual small zone base stations.  In Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant area, they built a special long-range base station at the outer edge of the 30km radius area, facing towards the Nuke Plant for the people working on the recovery effort.

In addition to the direct recovery effort, DoCoMo is introducing 20-billion yen scale disaster readiness plans across the nation.  Some are regular things such as increasing the satellite phone inventory, and my favorites are those two.

1)      Large zone backup

DoCoMo is building the backup base stations on top of the DoCoMo/NTT switching offices, where robust power back up is available.  It gets lit up to cover 7km radius when a disaster strikes and regular base stations are down in the area.  They are building average of 2 of these backup stations per prefecture (5 for Tokyo and 4 for Osaka). 

2)      Voice transfer system

Right after the earthquake this time, they had to limit circuit switch voice traffic by 80%, but data could get by with only 30% limit.  However, some people still have difficulties in using e-mails, so they are planning a backup voice file system to be implemented this fiscal year.  When a caller makes a call but hits the limitation, the circuit automatically diverted to the voice mail system, and the voice message gets turned into a voice file and gets delivered to the destination phone number in digital voice.

App for autism "Voice4u" won Japan's "Android Application Award"

Android App for communication of autistic people, "Voice4u", just won the top prize at "A3 (Android Application Award)", organized by Nikkei BP and sponsored by major Japanese carriers and international device vendors.

Voice4u is created by my friends Yumi Kubo and Sei Higuchi, and I have been supporting them from early on.  Yumi is mother of an autistic boy and she developed this app, as portable, affordable and "cool" tool for kids with communication problems.

Voice4u English site

ustream of the award presentation

And by the way, my son is working as a volunteer to help this app.  If you know anyone with autism who has problem communicating, please let her/him know about this app!

Michi

Japan Telecom Recovery - Another quake, another mobile service stoppage

News reports say another strong quake hit Northern Japan, just about the same area as the big one one month ago.

NHK video footage of Sendai shows a big flash of light on the horizon and the city lights went off.  My Twitter TL says it is likely that an electricity substation had short circuit or something.  Other tweets say that Onagawa Nuke Power Plant, another working power plant in the area, has taken additional safety measures and it is OK.

Again, according to my TL, mobile phones in Sendai area are not working perfectly now, because of the carriers' restrictions rather than the physical damage or power problem of the base stations.  As long as the power recovers, service is likely to be restored.  Currently, data connection is relatively better.

Michi