TOKYO, May 7, 2021—Having worked as a journalist for several major world news entities, I have experienced many serious telecommunications disconnections, some as long as a week, disabling transmitting important stories and data to headquarters and regional hub bureaus. This experience makes me speculating that serious telecom disruptions might be lurking about in the Japanese network systems as a whole. Hope is that my concern is overblown and the problems that I have experienced in cross-border and local Japanese connections would go away.
What I have experienced is a sudden and frequent loss of connections on my mobile phone, busy signals I hear when calling to counterparties on both mobile and landline phones, very slow internet speed even perusing plain-vanila items, definitely not heavy pdf files.
This annoying condition in Tokyo, I noticed, started about two days ago. NTT East’s landlines were mobbed by swarms of calls frantically trying to secure Covid-19 vaccine appointments starting from May 6. That much I knew. But the number of attempted calls to local municipal offices must have not been in the hundreds of thousands, supposedly small enough calls NTT East’s switches can handle, as they did during the March 11, 2011 earthquake-tsunami disaster and several ensuing days.
So I have come to speculate that NTT East might be crimping on its telecom pipes. As of May 6, the disruption problem (or getting busy signals when calling to other numbers) was limited to landline. But on May 7, while the landline telephone service seemed to have been stable (don’t knopw for sure), the NTT East’s internet connection was wobbly, to say the least,
freezing frequently and forcing me to reload and so on. In the meanwhile, my iPhone that uses the NTT DoCoMo signals lost connections almost every minute this afternoon.
My journalist gut instict is that people who could not get to what they wanted to see on the internet through wi-fi connections (which are serviced ultimately by the NTT East landlines now matter what carriers you use), igrated to using DoCoMo radio signals, forcing the mobile telecom to automatically cut off connections when its signal capacity nears full.
If/when this condition continues over the coming days, it’s possible that the problem would spill over more widely, out of Tokyo to surrounding areas as NTT telecom switches automatically rout calls and internet traffic when Tokyo capacity is up to the neck.
Something close to that happened in March 2011, and NTT DoCoMo and other carriers asked people to curb using smart phones.
This time, since the NTT group is likely to have reduce telecom band capacity – probably substantially – to save costs, Tokyo’s disruption could ripple to other areas like tsunami and electricity blackout.
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Insight Into the Future