ULTRA SPEED

» see mb.softbank.jp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

ULTRA SPEED was a number before it was anything else. SoftBank ran two carriers of 21 Mbps HSPA+ side by side and sold the sum: 42 Mbps down, which in late 2010 was a larger figure than anything docomo was advertising. The technique is called DC-HSDPA. The whole thing lived on one 1.5 GHz block of SoftBank's Japanese spectrum, which is where the trouble came from.

It went on sale on 25 February 2011, and only to companies, on a ZTE USB stick called the 004Z. SoftBank would not publish a coverage map at launch because there was almost nothing to map: the DC-HSDPA area was described to reporters as parts of central Tokyo, about 12 percent of the population, with a promise of 60 percent by June. Step outside it and you dropped to 14.4 Mbps. Consumers could not buy it at all until 8 July 2011, when the ULTRA WiFi 007Z pocket router arrived, 133 days after the launch SoftBank had already held.

Then, on 20 February 2012, Japan's satellite broadcasters began test transmissions on two new BS digital channels, BS21 and BS23. Those transmissions sat close enough to 1.5 GHz that any home leaking them could interfere with ULTRA SPEED, and Japanese homes leaked them generously: unused L-shaped aerial plugs left in the wall socket, unshielded coaxial cable behind the television, outdoor antenna boosters. Connection rates fell and speeds collapsed. Only the 1.5 GHz band was affected, which meant SoftBank's ordinary 2 GHz service was fine and its fastest product was the one being knocked over.

Satellite dishes hang off every other balcony in Turkey, so the hardware here is not exotic to me at all. What makes this a Japanese story is the coincidence underneath it: two new broadcast channels landing right beside the one band SoftBank had staked its fastest product on, in a country where the wiring behind them reaches almost every apartment.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what the counter made you sign ~

On the evening of 24 February 2012, two days after its first public notice, SoftBank confirmed to Keitai Watch what its shops had been doing. Anyone buying an ULTRA SPEED handset was being asked to sign a written acknowledgement that leakage from faulty satellite receiving equipment might interfere with the service, and to enter the contract on that understanding. A carrier selling its fastest network was taking signatures at the counter to confirm you had been told it might not work at home.

The form then spread to a product that was not itself affected. SoftBank 4G had launched that same day at up to 110 Mbps, and its 101SI pocket router used 1.5 GHz ULTRA SPEED as its fallback layer. So 4G buyers signed the form too. If you were affected, a smartphone could drop to the 2 GHz network and a router could hop to the 1.7 GHz sub-area, which belonged to eMobile rather than SoftBank and was rented wholesale.

~ the warning from 2008 ~

None of this was a surprise to anyone who had been paying attention. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications ran a liaison group on radio interference, and in 2008 it had already warned installers that BS21 and BS23 could bleed into mobile phone bands. The warning went out more than three years before the channels existed. The test transmissions simply made it true.

By April 2012 SoftBank was running a support operation that belonged to a different industry. It was identifying individual buildings whose leakage was reaching its base stations and working through them worst first. Ministry officials sometimes came along on the inspections. The cause might be your own wiring or the house next door, so the fix differed household by household, and SoftBank said it would not bill users for work that came down to somebody's bad installation. Meanwhile it was asking its own customers, in writing, to go and pull disused plugs out of their living room walls.

~ the band went to lte ~

WILLCOM had resold the thing for years under the name 3G Data Flat-Rate (S), and when the interference hit in 2012 it had to publish the same apology SoftBank did, for a fault in a network it did not own and caused by television sets it had never sold.

The end itself was ordinary. On 30 September 2016 SoftBank gave notice that the 1.5 GHz 3G service would stop at 2am on Friday 31 March 2017, so that the block could carry LTE from April instead. The stated reason was efficient use of spectrum, and there is no reason to doubt it. Nobody ever published how many people were on ULTRA SPEED.

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