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Hold on... it wasn't all that long after the quake that the Yamanote-sen stopped running during morning rush hour one day and people around Shinjuku (and possibly other areas but Shinjuku got all the press) weren't able to use their cell phones for hours. I'm not sure "deteriorization" of the network is the issue as much as the infrastructure not keeping up with the device population. The other problem is with the humans that carry the phones. When a call doesn't go through, pretty much everyone tries again right away so even a small anomaly can rack up to heavy traffic really quickly. No carrier ever builds out based on 99% of their subscribers trying to use the phone at the same time.

I'd be in favor of an algorithm that dropped voice calls in favor of SMS when the network is overloaded with a sudden surge of traffic. At least it would mean being able to get a message across.

BTW, Docomo didn't go down completely on 3/11. I was able to get a few calls through. And the SMS messages I sent were ultimately delivered, for the most part -- in some cases, hours after I sent them ;-).

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 11:49 AM, Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com> wrote:

On Tue, Feb 18, 2014 at 7:44 AM, David Blomberg <dblomber@example.com> wrote:
> Another problem with the old pagers is the coverage was awesome but as
> many people found out on March 11 a few years back was the Cell system has
> been gutted to the point that decent coverage is a thing of the past. I
> found a phone booth pretty quick so avoided the lines but the only friends
> that had coverage continue after the quake were AU users. My Softbank
> service was out until 10:30 that evening and a NTT friend of mine said about
> same for them.

I'm not trying to defend mobile phone providers in Japan, but that
March 11 earthquake was an exceptional circumstance that is suppose to
happen "one in a hundred years". I'm not sure if that is a good
example of Japan's declining cellular system... The mobile network
handles annual events such as New Year's Eve with few problems. To
get it back within 8 hours on a day like that is not too bad; I doubt
many countries could do the same under similar circumstances...

Add to the fact that phone booths were fairly easy to find, not
covered in chewing gum or graffiti (like in most cities outside of
Japan), and were free after the earthquake, I think things still went
fine... (Maybe in case of emergencies, they could encourage customers
to use text messages only for a bit?)

Ray

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Re: [tlug] What is the Sysadmin pager these days?