TOKYO, July 3, 2022—The two-day-long mobile telecommunications outage of au/KDDI, Japan’s second largest mobile carrier, has not only inconvenienced millions of Japanese phone users but also leveled sharp blows to the future of Japan’s digital society initiatives: autonomous driving, smart houses, remote medical surgery, robotics, and metaverse, among many, on top of e-commerce, movies, gaming and others that are at play now.
The massive glitch hit the telecom carrier’s Tama server storage facility at 1:35 a.m., July 2 and the company said it cannot be fixed until 5:30 p.m., July 3. KDDI’s au and UQ Mobile services for individual customers, as well as its ‘povo’ data service, also for individuals, are being affected, it said. Corporate customers, government offices, also are affected, totaling a many as 62.1 million contracted users. In addition, Rakuten Mobile, the fourth largest carrier, was partially affected, it said.
The Asahi national daily reported following entities were being affected:
–The Japan Meteorological Agency for weather data collection;
–Yamato Holding Co. for package deliveries;
–The Fire and Disaster Management Agency for emergency calls;
–Ogaki Kyoritsu Bank for ATM machines:
–Japan Post Co. for mail and package deliveries; and
–Japan Freight Railway Co. for cargo collection.
In addition, Toyota Motor Corp. said its T-Connect service using au/KDDI telecom signals, Suzuki Motor Co., Subaru Corp., were being affected. Toyota holds 13.74 percent shares of au/KDDI, second largest after Kyocera’s 14.54 percent. Toyota is experimenting autonomous driving, smart housing and other next-gen technologies at its Woven City town near Mt.Fuji.
What the telecom disruption taught Japan is that prolonged telecom outage levels unfathomable risks to next-gen technologies, particularly in the transport and medical areas. It most likely forces a rethinking of the entire future digitalization initiatives that the Japanese government Digital Agency and the private-sector are pursuing.
NTT DoCoMo, the largest carrier, suffered a similar, albeit smaller-scale, telecom down time earlier.
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Insight Into the Future