＜prologue＞
I started a blog called “The Baby Boomer Generation’s Miscellaneous Blog”（Dankai-sedai no garakutatyou:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳） in July 2018, about a year before I fully retired. More than six years have passed since then, and the number of articles has increased considerably.
So, in order to make them accessible to people who don’t understand Japanese, I decided to translate my past articles into English and publish them.
It may sound a bit exaggerated, but I would like to make this my life’s work.
It should be noted that haiku and waka （Japanese short fixed form poems） are quite difficult to translate into English, so some parts are written in Japanese.
If you are interested in haiku or waka and would like to know more, please read introductory or specialized books on haiku or waka written in English.
I also write many articles about the Japanese language. I would be happy if these inspire more people to want to learn Japanese.
my blog’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多（がらくた）帳 | 団塊世代が雑学や面白い話を発信しています
my X’s URL:団塊世代の我楽多帳（@historia49）さん / X
<2022/7/4 postscript> This time, KDDI experienced a large-scale communication failure and did not fully recover for more than three days.
The large-scale communication failure that occurred at KDDI at 1:00 a.m. on July 2 was caused by a chain of problems that occurred at equipment in the communication network. The impact could be three times as large as the failure caused by NTT DOCOMO in October 2021.
In addition to the in-house services of “au,” “UQ mobile,” and “povo,” services of Toyota Motor Corporation and SECOM, which use KDDI’s cell phone lines, have also been affected. The failure of telecommunications, which has become an important infrastructure supporting people’s lives, has once again highlighted the enormous impact it can have on all aspects of life.
In the future, it will be necessary to manage risk by factoring in the possibility of failures, and then bring them under control on a small scale and within a short period of time.
At a press conference held on July 3, KDDI President Makoto Takahashi said, “We reviewed everything after the DOCOMO failure, but we were naive.
1. massive communication failure of Softbank’s smartphones
On December 6 of this year, a communication failure occurred on a nationwide scale, disabling Softbank smartphones for 4.5 hours from around 1:39 pm to 6:04 pm, affecting 30.6 million connections. It also had a serious negative impact on a wide area across the country.
The QR code matching of tickets for GLAY’s Nagoya concert was affected, delivery company drivers were not notified of redelivery information, payments could not be made with the smartphone payment service Pay Pay, and low-cost airline Jetstar was unable to match boarding passes using smartphones, causing delays to departures.
2. causes of major communication failures
The cause was a “problem with the switching equipment (MME) involved in LTE”. Specifically, the cause seemed to be that the “software certificate” for the packet switching equipment manufactured by Ericsson in Sweden had expired.
Softbank recovered by reverting the MME software to an older version.
However, the fact that the packet switching systems in Tokyo and Osaka were both manufactured by Ericsson was another cause of the communication failure that spread nationwide.
If one of them had been a packet switching system of another company, the communication failure would not have been nationwide.
3. urgent need to establish a backup system
I hope that SoftBank will establish a backup system as soon as possible, and at the same time, I would like other companies to review their backup systems as well.
4. Public phones and telephone cards are being reevaluated
By the way, this commotion has once again brought attention to two things: public telephones and telephone cards.
This communication failure caused many people to look for “pay phones” or wait in line. Public phone booths” used to be a common sight, but nowadays we rarely see them. They are being removed more and more.
In order to avoid panicking when a situation like this occurs, it may be necessary to check where “pay phones (boxes)” are located along commuting routes on a daily basis.
Generally, they are installed in railroad stations, city center boulevards, city halls, airports, large hotels, hospitals, etc.
If you check NTT West’s “Public Telephone Installation Location Search” site on the Internet, you can see where public telephones are installed on a map.
Until about 20 years ago, I used to receive telephone cards as gifts. I also heard that telephone cards of idols were sold at high prices. However, I rarely see them these days. I, too, have sold all of the telephone cards I had accumulated to a money store. Now there are only a few “telephone cards with holes” left.
Nowadays, “telephone cards” are sold at convenience stores and hospitals with public telephones.
5. the “Achilles’ heel” of a smartphone-dependent society
Is this the “Achilles’ heel” or “blind spot” of our “smartphone-dependent society”?
In the age of manual labor, mistakes had limited impact. However, in today’s IT age, as in the case of Softbank’s smartphone communication failure, it can have far-reaching negative effects.
I think there are many problems with the current situation of “depending too much on smartphones for everything.” There are people in the world who don’t own “smartphones” or “flip-phones.” So is it okay to have a “ticket matching system that assumes that people have smartphones”?
It is said that “If you are not a Heike, you are not a person” is a phrase attributed to Taira no Kiyomori, which expresses the conceit of the Heike people. Nowadays, we might say, “If you don’t have a smartphone, you are not a person”?
But in any case, the “backup system” we can do is to always have a “telephone card” on hand (of course, small coins are OK, but 10 yen coins are heavy if there are many) and to know where “public telephones” are located in the vicinity.
Another important thing is to carry a “paper-based phone number list” for the phone numbers that are usually in your phone’s address book, as well as for those you need to contact in an emergency. If you are good at memorizing phone numbers, however, you can probably get by with a list of phone numbers in your head…