The news of DoCoMo data service outage is much hyped in Japan. On January 25, eastern half of Tokyo Metropolitan Area suffered from the outage for almost 5 hours, due to an increased signaling traffic caused by Android phones, combined with DoCoMo's "miscalculation" of traffic in switching over to a new network equipment (uhh... really??). DoCoMo's executives, including President and CEO Takamochi Yamada getting 20% pay cut for 3 months. The carrier is adding tens of billions of yens in their network investment due to this incident.

Ouch!

Yes, they are finally feeling the real pain. Smartphone user number is still much smaller in Japan compared to the U.S., and they are still learning how to cope with it.

The problem has been well acknowledged in the US for the past several years, and AT&T+Ericsson team has been working very hard on this issue. So I was thinking that Japanese major carriers are well prepared for it, but I guess not. I am not quite sure what EXACTLY happened, and I still have a slight doubt that they are sorta expecting this and are getting prepared for rate increase by hyping it up...

As a separate matter, there was a huge problem in so-called "sp-mode", DoCoMo version of IP-based SNS service earlier in the month, and KDDI is suffered from a smaller network problem unrelated to smartphone issues.

Tough times for carriers, for sure.