/ Xeni Jardin / 9:42 am Fri Mar 11, 2011

Japan: text, not voice, serves as communication lifeline in quake aftermath

CNET reports on how the people of Japan are coping with overloaded (and carrier-restricted) cellphone networks, after today's catastrophic quake: they're turning to text messaging, and "social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Mixi." The carriers are "limiting voice calls on congested networks, with NTT DoCoMo restricting up to 80 percent of voice calls, especially in Tokyo and in northeast Japan, where 30-foot tsunami waves caused extensive damage." Anecdotal tweets describe people lining up to use payphones in Japan, with some people not knowing how they work.

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  1. Facebook for me has been an absolute lifeline. As well as being able to share useful information with people that need it and reassure family overseas, my wife who couldn’t contact me via mail was able to do so this way and let me know her plans for getting home. The telcos really need to sort out their infrastructure…

  2. Here’s a time when limiting non-emergency communications to 80-character chuncks makes sense.

  3. We have been trying to contact our son, Michael Tonge, and his wife and child, Yuka and Aoi with no success. He teaches English in Sendai.

    Rob

    1. At last Michael has been able to contact us. Problem was down to the phone networks being shut down and/or overloaded. He and his family are all OK thank God.
      Rob

  4. IIRC, payphones in Japan are very complicated affairs that require some sort of card or something, not a simple put-coins-in, make-call kind of thing.

  5. They are re-learning the lessons of past disasters. In the DC area on 9/11/2001, the cell system overloaded and collapsed under the sheer volume of calls. However, I found the following workarounds: 1) calls to dedicated “#” or “*” numbers went through unhindered. I used one such number to reach a radio station to find out about traffic (I needed to get to an evacuation site). 2) most cell to landline calls were being made to local numbers, so long distance lines were open. I called friends in Texas who then relayed the information to my wife in Virginia. 3) cell to cell calls just would not go through. However, they would drop into voice mail. So my wife and I also communicated that way.
    At the time texting was widespread. However, Sprint Voicenet(?) with its low bandwidth requirements did work. Now, like the article mentioned, texting and internet access make communications a bit easier.

  7. I was in central Tokyo when this happened, and yeah, people were lining up to use the few remaining public payphones — I saw it myself

    Here’s a photo I took (posted on Facebook, so dunno if it’s visible to everyone) of the queue outside my local library — a sight I saw repeated during my three-hour walk home. (A more “artistic” — i.e., crappier — version is at on my Tumblr page

    Yeah, mobile services went down like the Hindenburg, but text and Internet worked on people’s smartphones. In my case, I was carrying a Portable WiFi device that let me access Facebook, websites, and Twitter at all times on my iPod Touch.

    And my friends and co-workers were using Facebook heavily — checking in, asking questions, communicating back and forth — all night. And during a brief period when people went back into the building before the aftershocks put paid to that idea, I did some quick back-and-forths on the desktop computer’s Facebook chat with a couple of friends in Los Angeles and the Maldives, letting them know what was going on.

    By God, the tools worked.

  8. Texting is ideal in situations like this, I understand that most modern mobile phones have a capability to receive and buffer SMS messages, and relay them to other phones (to be then re-relayed) in the event that towers go down. This feature is designed precisely for sub-optimal scenarios, based on the extremely low-bandwith needed for SMS versus voice. My understanding is that this feature is disabled in US phones, for what reason I cannot fathom.

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