TOKYO, May 10, 2021—As The Prospect reported earlier, NTT group and otrher Japanese telecom carriers are limiting network traffic to preempt system-wide disruptions that may be triggered by sudden gluts of Covid-19 vaccine appoiment calls municipalities begin accepting from May 10.
Many Japanese municipalities (about 100 in Tokyo and the same number in the greater Osaka area) May 10 began joining a small band of their peers that already had been taking vaccine calls on landline phones and on-line. Last week, greater Tokyo telecom networks were partially disrupted by the first wave of phone calls on landlines, mobile networks, and internet access. Emergency numbrs, including ambulance and fire (119) and police (110) are assigned separate telecom switches, so they are intact, but hospitals, schools, and other essential establishments, as well as non-essential entities would face the possibility of no connections for extended times.
As written in The Prospect last week, the networks’ traffic processing capacity has been reduced significantly in recent years as the country shifts mobil network protocols to one centered around 5G, the work that began physically only recently. Overlapping with this shift, the NTT group carriers, which serves ‘the last mile’ of its rival carriers including KDDI and Softbank Yahoo BB, since 2017 has been revising its old copper metal landline works to high-speed optical fiber networks for both telephone and internet traffic for businesses and homes. The story goes further: NTT’s mobile unit, NTT DoCoMo and its mobile competitors are currently in the midst of pouring capital and resources into developing 5G radio signal band technology to toss the current LTE network technology. In lay persons’ parlance, it amounts to driving a Formula-1 racing car instead of a Cadillac.
All those changes are being orchestrated by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications bureaucracy. The Japanese telecom network’s vulnerability, which came to light in the March 11, 2011 earthquake-tsunami disaster and the latest telecom inconvenience, is uncommon in developed countries. Why this has gripped the world’s third largest economy is a long story, yet it can be traced to a policy of developing home-grown technology in vital industrial areas including telecom and defense. In the 1980s-1990s, foreign telecoms made a stab at the Japanese telecom industry but all were repelled by invisible regulatory barriers, leaving only Japanese capitalized telecoms operating. The surviving telecoms have been happily doing business collaborating (conniving) with the telecom ministry’s bureaucracy.
The public was forced to pay the price of this locked telecom policy by being denied easy access to Covid vaccine appointment phone numbers, complicated and expensive landline telephone, mobile, and internet systems.
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