NTT East Learned Lessons from Last Year’s Japan Earthquake
Outgoing voice traffic jumped 60-fold in the hours after the worst earthquake in Japan’s history, and NTT East officials had to scramble to implement traffic restrictions and ensure priority communication could go through, an NTT delegation told attendees at an NTCA event Wednesday in Washington. The real damage came not from the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake, but from the tsunami it caused. The tsunami reached as high as 50 feet, spread up to four miles inland, and covered 400 miles of coast -- the distance between Washington, D.C., and Boston. NTT East lost 65,000 poles, 1,900 miles of conduits, 5,000 miles of cables and 12 of its central offices were completely destroyed when the waves became higher than the offices’ flood barriers. That’s according to Takashi Ebihara, director of network service management in the core network center, who was working in the network operations center when the quake hit. “The situation was very chaotic,” he said. “Even our seasoned operators couldn’t find out what was going on in the network."
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In the hours after the quake incoming calls were up 40-fold. Carriers restricted fixed phone line voice traffic by 80-90 percent, and mobile phone traffic by 70-95 percent, said Masaru Fujino, counselor for communications policy for the Embassy of Japan. Packet traffic also increased, but only by about four times as much as the previous week, he said. Congestion didn’t just stymie voice calls. Emails were delayed because of congestion at some servers, Fujino said: Just 15 percent of email was delivered immediately, 80 percent went through within 30 minutes and 90 percent was delivered within 80 minutes.
NTT East set up 4,000 free public phone lines in evacuation centers and hospitals, and provided broadband access to 450 locations. It also deployed 100 power supply vehicles as a failsafe in case the backup generators died, and dispatched remote terminals to “replace demolished central offices,” Ebihara said. He said workers who found handwritten notes manually entered them into NTT’s “171” voice message board service, which lets people leave emergency messages for others. “We are very proud that we could connect people, and we could reconnect Japan,” Ebihara said.
Going forward, NTT has negotiated with convenience store chains to preinstall Wi-Fi lines and emergency public phones, which can be turned on during emergencies and used free of charge. NTT also has introduced vehicles with mobile Wi-Fi stations and special antennas that can reach more than 10 miles. It uses conventional Wi-Fi, “but you can shape the beam to a specific direction and then communicate with our central office, and a multihop system can actually make a connection,” Ebihara said.
A study group has since made several recommendations. They include developing new technology that’s resistant to congestion, “crossover searching” to allow interoperability between different carriers’ emergency message systems, introducing more emergency power sources, and encouraging roaming agreements between telecom carriers for emergency calls, said Kei Ikeda, director of maintenance and service operations at NTT East.
"We have -- at least in the telephone infrastructure, and I think in the ways that the cable infrastructure intersects with it -- plans that are very similar,” said NCTA President Michael Powell, who was FCC chairman during the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The FCC has several organizations that “spend an infinite amount of time on best practices. Our government has lots of organizations that are in regular conversation about this, at least in telecom,” he said. The U.S. also has a government emergency telecommunications service, which prioritizes traffic. “I had a card,” Powell said. “I could, in an emergency, push a code and increase my priority in the communications network. … Communications is one of the best-prepared industries.”