TOKYO, March 29 Asia Pulse - Some 90 per cent of mobile phone base stations in the regions of Japan devastated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami are back up and running.
The nation's three leading mobile service carriers had just 1,420 nonoperating stations as of Sunday, a significant improvement from roughly 14, 200 downed sites on March 12.
NTT DoCoMo Inc. (TSE:9437) reported that about 700 sites were not working as of 1 p.m. Sunday. It placed mobile base stations in about 20 locations, including an area near an elementary school in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, so that evacuees can use the service at shelters in the most seriously affected areas.
KDDI Corp.'s (TSE:9433) backbone cables linking the Tohoku and Hokkaido regions and greater Tokyo were severed due to the earthquake, but the firm has since established bypassing communication routes that restore service. It had just 297 out-of-service base stations as of 11 a.m. Sunday, down sharply from 3,680 sites at the worst point.
The number of downed Softbank Mobile Corp. stations has also declined to 429 as of 3 p.m. Sunday from some 3,800. Besides a 200-engineer team, the firm dispatched on March 18 a group of about 200 internal volunteers to work on restoring infrastructure in an effort to provide temporary communications facilities.
On the other hand, fixed-line service remains largely disrupted. Service was unavailable on 83,100 NTT East Corp. lines as of Sunday. The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (TSE:9432) unit's Internet service was not working for 23,700 lines as well.
"The disaster's impact on mobile providers is estimated at 300 million yen to 2.5 billion yen in sales, but the fixed-line losses will likely be more severe," says Kohei Kajimoto, an analyst at UBS Securities Japan Ltd.
(Nikkei) cg 29-03 1321
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