QuickCast (クイックキャスト)

» see nttdocomo.co.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Japan's first public paging service opened on 1 July 1968, run by the state telephone monopoly and covering the twenty three wards of Tokyo. The receiver was the Pocket Bell B-type RC11, now registered as an Essential Historical Material for Science and Technology, number 00087. Its only function was to beep. It cost 2,000 yen a month with a 10,000 yen prepayment, and from 1970 a deposit on top of that, which stayed in place for twenty five years.

For roughly its first twenty years it was a work tool and nothing else. Salarymen carried one because the office needed to reach them, and so did doctors on call. In 1987 handsets arrived that could receive a few digits sent as touch tones, which meant the caller could type in a phone number and the person being paged could ring it back instead of guessing. The product was exactly that simple: the network carried one number, and the number was always a telephone somebody wanted you to ring. The paging business passed from NTT to DoCoMo in July 1992, and on to eight regional DoCoMo companies a year after that.

Then, starting around 1992, the product was taken over by people it had never been designed for. Japanese high school girls worked out that the numeric keypad could encode the language, and within four years the pager had stopped being a callback device and become a messaging network. DoCoMo's own breakdown for fiscal 1996 shows how completely this happened: seventy percent of all contracts were personal rather than corporate, and of new contracts that year, ninety five percent were personal. DoCoMo's subscriber count peaked that June at about 6.49 million, inside a national figure of roughly 10.78 million across every operator.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the number codes ~

The system worked because Japanese numbers can be read aloud as syllables. DoCoMo published its own list of the common ones when it looked back on the service: 0840 for ohayou, good morning, and 3470 for sayonara when the conversation was over. 49 meant shikyuu, urgent, while 889 was hayaku, hurry up, and 0906 told somebody you were running late. The two that turn up most often are 724106, nani shiteru, what are you doing, and 14106, aishiteru, I love you.

It also had dialects. In parts of Kansai and Kyushu the love declaration ran 1410, aishitoo, because that is how the phrase sounds there. The Tokai region went further and pulled punctuation into the alphabet, so a message reading 86] 10 [10- 4106 0U3 decodes as Paruko de kaimono shiteru, Mayumi, meaning Mayumi is out shopping at the Parco department store. Reading that required you to share a key with the sender and to already know who Mayumi was.

This is also exactly why none of it traveled. A messaging medium whose entire vocabulary depends on how Japanese numerals sound when spoken is not portable to anywhere else, and no amount of documentation makes 14106 mean anything in Turkish or English. Western pagers of the same years stayed what Japanese pagers had been in 1985, a device that told a doctor to call the hospital.

~ the payphones ~

The boom broke the infrastructure underneath it in two different places. Message delivery started running late in the busy evening hours because the network was congested by teenagers, and separately, the public telephones used to send the messages began failing from sheer overuse. Operators spent the peak years firefighting both.

~ the slang ~

There was enough of a subculture for it to generate its own vocabulary, most of it built on beru, the clipped form of the brand. A beru-tomo was a pager friend, somebody you only knew through digits. Beru-nan meant firing a message at a randomly guessed pager number to see who answered. Kara-beru was the empty page, where it buzzed and nothing was in it. A 1993 television drama called Pokeberu ga Naranakute, The Pager Does Not Ring, took the device as its title and produced a hit theme song of the same name.

~ the word they dropped ~

On 1 January 2001 NTT DoCoMo stopped calling the service Pocket Bell and started calling it QuickCast, a coinage welded together from quick and multicast. It announced the change on 19 December 2000 and gave a reason, which carriers of that era usually did not. The customer base had been shifting from individuals to companies, DoCoMo said, so it wanted a brand name aimed at business users. The logo was meant to suggest a circle of people with information flying into it at speed.

That makes the rebrand a dated record of when DoCoMo gave up on the consumer version. The receivers were by then increasingly going somewhere other than a pocket, installed inside vending machines and taxi cabs and wired to small LED boards, so a central transmitter could push news flashes or emergency bulletins to thousands of screens at once. DoCoMo kept the transmitters and the licenses and changed what the product was for.

~ who was still carrying one ~

The last customers of any size were not people. Keio Electric Railway ran an NEC-built information display system off it, feeding the boards at station ticket gates and the LED strips inside the trains. Kanagawa Toshi Kotsu put QuickCast receivers inside small displays in its taxis to scroll news and advertising at passengers.

New applications closed in June 2004. The shutdown itself was announced on 25 April 2005, a full two years before it happened, and by the time of that announcement DoCoMo was down to about 290,000 contracts from its 6.49 million peak. A customer notice went up in October 2006 confirming Saturday 31 March 2007 as the final day, and it doubled as a refund notice: there was a dedicated QuickCast closure office with a freephone number, returning contract fees and unused prepayments. DoCoMo named the cause itself, which was mobile phones and PHS handsets that could carry a message in both directions.

Paging itself outlived the brand. A successor company called Tokyo Telemessage was split out of YOZAN in October 2008 and kept serving existing subscribers, then stopped selling to the public in September 2019. The transmitters are still running: since 2013 the same technology has carried a 280 MHz municipal disaster broadcast system, developed with the city of Chigasaki. It takes text sent over the old paging rail and reads it aloud through a receiver in the house, so the network that once carried 14106 now carries municipal disaster warnings.

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