ソラテナ (Soratena)

» see au.com/mobile/service/list/end/soratena as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The announcement was made on a ship. On 29 September 2010, KDDI and Weathernews put reporters in the helicopter hangar of the Shirase, the Antarctic research vessel, tied up at Funabashi port in Chiba, and told them that au was going to bolt a weather station onto about three thousand of its mobile base stations. Makoto Takahashi, then a KDDI executive vice president, framed it as a way to take something everyone checks and put au's own spin on it. Tomohiro Ishibashi of Weathernews put it more plainly: base stations tend to sit in good places for watching the sky, and they already have power and a network line, so the more he thought about it the better the fit looked.

The scale is what makes it odd even now. Japan's national observation network, AMeDAS, had around 1,300 rainfall stations. This put kit on roughly 3,000 towers, and the kit could register things AMeDAS does not. There was a rain detector that caught the first drops instead of waiting for a gauge to fill, and an ultraviolet sensor ROHM had developed for the job that split the reading into A and B bands. Carbon dioxide was in there too. Meisei Electric worked on the hardware alongside them, and some sites got a live camera pointed at the sky.

Then KDDI did the thing that keeps this out of the spectrum filings and puts it here instead. Rather than publish the numbers, it gave each observation post a personality. The service was called Soratena, from sora, the word for sky, joined to antenna, and the pitch written into the press materials was an antenna that watches over the sky and tweets what it sees. A trial opened in late November 2010 on about 100 towers around Tokyo, on EZweb handsets and the IS01. Nobody had to apply for it and nobody was billed for it. You paid the packet charges and nothing else.

~ the record ~

~ five characters and a cup ~

Search for a Soratena and five of them turned up, each with its own personality and each good at one weather element, so the one that spoke to you about humidity was not the one that spoke to you about wind. Some locations had a rare local character instead. The antennas posted short remarks in the first person about what they were feeling, and they asked you a question that changed every day, sometimes about the heat and sometimes about whatever was in season. The app also learned, because cold in one prefecture is not cold in another, and the service collected answers from users on things a sensor cannot read, such as whether long sleeves were the right call this morning.

Underneath the chatter the data was real. Every element had a graph showing the last twenty-four hours, and where a tower carried a camera you could look at the actual sky it was describing. Registering a favorite antenna built up Soratena Cups under certain conditions, which was KDDI's way of getting you to register one wherever you traveled. By 30 May 2011 the thing was running nationwide, a month behind the April date the original release had promised.

~ the cost of charm ~

Nothing like this was available to me. A Turkish weather app in 2011 read from a handful of state stations and told you a number for the whole city, which is roughly what a national meteorological service can afford to do. The Soratena arrangement only works if one company already owns thousands of powered cabinets standing in the right places with a line back to head office, and then decides the best use for that advantage is cartoons. That is a carrier with money to spend on charm.

~ what the name does now ~

Weathernews still sells a Soratena. It is Soratena Pro these days, a small observation unit built with Omron that takes a reading every minute across seven elements, wind and illuminance among them, and it is sold to companies and municipalities rather than to anyone with a handset. In June 2025 Yamagata City put one in each of its fifty-two schools after a trial in six of them. So the brand is still in service and the hardware idea was sound. A liveness check on the word Soratena will tell you the wrong thing about this grave.

What died was the consumer app with the faces on it, on 30 March 2017. KDDI's end-of-service page carries one sentence saying the service finished on that date and a second saying that everything else printed there describes it as it stood on the day it closed. No reason is given. That is standard for this register: au publishes the date a service ended and never the reason or the number of people it ended for.

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