EZweb

» see ezweb.ne.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

EZweb was japan-only at the carrier layer, which is a specific kind of unreachable. It was not a website i could have found and chosen not to use. It was a menu that existed only if the phone in your hand had been sold by au, on a network that existed only in japan, and there was no version of my life in 2001 where that was going to happen.

The DDI Cellular Group switched it on 14 april 1999, seven weeks after NTT Docomo launched i-mode. IDO was running the same service under the name EZaccess, Tu-Ka joined in november, and by the time the companies had been merged into KDDI's au brand in 2000 the name EZweb covered all of it. What it did was put a browser on a phone, several years before anyone in europe had a reason to care.

Turkey got WAP in the same window and on the same standard, and what WAP meant there is what it meant almost everywhere outside japan: a handful of gray text pages, billed by the second, that nobody opened twice. Japan is the exception in this story and EZweb is half the reason it is the exception. The mobile internet worked there first because the carriers built the whole stack and paid content providers a share of a bill they were already collecting.

It ran for twenty-two years and died with the network underneath it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the standards fight ~

The technical difference between the two japanese mobile internets is the whole of why one of them was easier to like. Docomo's i-mode used cHTML, a cut-down version of the html people were already writing, so a web developer could produce an i-mode page in an afternoon. EZweb used HDML through an Openwave browser, and later WAP proper, and HDML was its own language with its own model of what a screen was. Writing for it was a separate job you had to be paid to learn.

WAP was the international standard, backed by everyone, and EZweb was the largest deployment of it that ever actually worked. That is the part worth keeping. Every complaint made about WAP in europe was true in japan too, and EZweb succeeded regardless, because the billing was solved and there was somewhere worth going once you got there.

~ what it invented ~

In december 2002 au put chaku-uta on EZweb. Until then a ringtone was a midi file, a machine playing an approximation of a song at you. Chaku-uta sold you a clip of the actual recording, the real singer, for a few hundred yen, and it was the first commercial service anywhere to do it. Chaku-uta full arrived in november 2004 with the whole track.

That is the origin of paid mobile music, and it happened on the platform people outside japan think of as the one that lost. The same service had turn-by-turn GPS navigation from december 2001 and java games from the same year, and in january 2006 LISMO let a phone sync its music library with a PC, three years before that was normal anywhere else.

~ the day it died ~

The brand went first. On 27 september 2007 KDDI replaced the EZweb top menu with au one, a portal with Google search wired into it, so the thing users actually landed on stopped being called EZweb fifteen years before the service stopped existing. The mail domain outlived the menu by a long way, which is why ezweb.ne.jp addresses kept turning up in japanese sign-up forms long after nobody was browsing an EZweb deck.

The service itself was tied to the network. CDMA 1X WIN went live in november 2003 and carried EZweb through its best years, and KDDI announced in november 2018 that it would end. It ended on 31 march 2022. Handsets that could not do au VoLTE stopped working the next morning, and everything sitting on them stopped with them.

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