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Japan's Mobile Year in Review

It was the best of times, it was… well, it really was the best of times! Also, as the famous line from Dickens goes, it was the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness and the season of.. Mobile!

Looking back on 2006, it’s hard to decide which news from Japan’s mobile scene was the most spectacular. Vodafone pulled out, Softbank stood up, mobile number portability struck, a record number of new handsets hit the street and – as December winds down – Motorola and Samsung are shipping first foreign-made 3G units into Japan.

A ‘quick’ look at what caught WWJ’s attention in ’06 after the jump.

NEC Starts Delivery of New 3G Series

NEC Corporation announced that it has started delivery of a new 3G (W-CDMA) Node B series “RS381, RS880.” The new series features Remote Radio Head (RRH) architecture, which divides the Node B into a main controller and a compact RRH outdoor unit. This allows flexible installation as the RRH outdoor unit can be installed within several dozen kilometers of the site, enabling response to a variety of situations and conditions.

MNP Crashed KDDI Systems

KDDI Corp. was forced to stop accepting mobile phone orders because of a computer glitch caused by a surge in calls on Sunday. KDDI officials said that au’s service computer that handles the orders slowed down at about 4 p.m. on Sunday, and stopped receiving orders. It began receiving orders at about 4:40 p.m., but again stopped at about 5 p.m. because of the computer glitch. The service resumed receiving orders on Monday, officials said.

Sanyo Shares Slide on Battery Recall

Shares of Sanyo Electric Co., the world’s largest maker of rechargeable batteries, fell to a 31- year low after 1.3 million of its cells used in mobile phones were recalled on concern they overheat and rupture. The lithium-ion batteries, made by a unit of Osaka-based Sanyo, are used in Mitsubishi Electric Corp. handsets on NTT DoCoMo Inc.’s high-speed service. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. confirmed it found six cases of burst batteries used in its Panasonic phones, responding to a Yomiuri newspaper report [see Japan Times in English]. Matsushita spokesman Junji Kanegawa said Sanyo wasn’t the battery maker, declining to name the manufacturer.

TCA – November Results Announced

The Telecom Carriers Association has released the official Japan mobile subscriber stats for November (current figures updated on our left navigation bar), with several stunning results. While not surprising – after the first full month of number portability – KDDI posted an impressive gain with a net +325,000 customers. In contrast, this might well be the first time that market leader NTT DoCoMo has ever announced a net client loss: -17,500. Perhaps even more shocking was the fact that their prized i-mode service also shed 56,200 subscribers! The SoftBank Mobile customer count – which is ‘confusing’ – indicated a net gain of +68,700 contracts, however they somehow managed to lose 3,600 subscribers to the company’s Yahoo! mobile web portal.. hmm? Finally, we saw the total number of 3G subscribers in Japan cross the 60M mark as the migration continued, showing gains of well over 1 mn upgrades per month.

SoftBank Mobile Subscriber Stats

According to an article on the Financial Times, SoftBank Mobile quietly changed the standard subscriber accounting procedure in October. Their ‘new method’ resulted in numbers which saved the company from having to announce a net loss of customers during their debut month. “The telecommunications group was able to report a net gain in subscribers only by extending the period for which it counts inactive users from six months to a year.. this allowed it to include prepaid subscribers who had not used their mobile phones for nearly 12 months. Japan’s other big mobile operators generally use three months as the cut-off period.”. We had speculated they would post a net loss in October — the TCA numbers for November will be released soon — Stay Tuned.