Willcom

» see willcom-inc.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

In July 1995 Japan switched on a mobile phone system that was not a mobile phone system. PHS was a cordless phone standard scaled up, with base stations the size of a shoebox bolted to lamp posts every few hundred meters. It was cheap to build and cheap to use. It also could not hand a call from one cell to the next if you were moving at any speed, which meant it worked beautifully while you stood still and dropped you the moment you got on a train.

Three operators launched into it on the same day. NTT Personal and Astel are footnotes. The third was DDI Pocket, which spent the next decade being the one that refused to die, and which renamed itself Willcom in February 2005 after the Carlyle Group bought control out of KDDI.

The rename came with the thing that made Willcom matter. In March 2005 it started selling a genuinely flat rate: unlimited calls to other Willcom users for 2,900 yen a month, and data plans that did not meter you. In 2005 every carrier on earth was still billing mobile data by the packet and sending people bills that ruined their month. Willcom charged one number and stopped counting, and Japan noticed. Subscribers passed 4.66 million at the end of July 2007.

Turkey was a long way from that offer. I had a broadband line at home by 2006, and a phone that could technically reach the internet on a tariff that made doing so a bad idea. Flat rate mobile data did not arrive here for years, and when it did it arrived on a network built for phones rather than on a parallel system somebody had kept alive for the people who mostly wanted a modem.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what PHS actually was ~

The engineering was honest about its own limits. Low transmit power meant long battery life and small cells, and small cells meant the capacity per square kilometer was high in exactly the places Japan is crowded. Inside a city it worked. It was also unusually good for data, because the same short range that broke handovers gave you a clean signal, and Willcom pushed that advantage hard.

The W-SIM appeared in 2005, a communication module about the size of a stick of gum that carried both your number and your network access. You pulled it out of a handset and pushed it into a laptop dongle or a PDA and the connection came with it. Willcom shipped the W-ZERO3 the same year, a slide out keyboard running Windows Mobile, which is one of the reasons Japanese people were carrying a pocket computer with a keyboard while the rest of us were still pressing 7 four times to get an S.

~ the flat rate years ~

For a few years Willcom was the network for a specific kind of person, the one who wanted to be online from a machine that was not a desk. The tariffs were the product and the phones were an accessory to them. It is the only carrier of that era whose subscriber base was visibly weighted toward people buying bandwidth rather than minutes.

Then 3G got cheap. The big three carriers rolled out data plans that were not much worse per yen and worked on a train, and the whole argument for a second network with worse coverage collapsed. Willcom answered with a next generation PHS that arrived too late and cost too much to build.

~ how it actually ended ~

The company filed for bankruptcy protection on 18 February 2010 with 206 billion yen in liabilities, one of the larger telecom failures Japan had seen. SoftBank took 100 percent of the shares that December as part of the rehabilitation. On 1 June 2014 Willcom was merged with eAccess into a company called Ymobile, and the brand stopped existing. Ymobile itself was absorbed into SoftBank Mobile ten months later, leaving Y!mobile as a tariff name on somebody else's network.

The radio outlived the company. PHS handsets kept working for ordinary subscribers until January 2021, and the industrial version stayed on for another two years after that, because hospitals had wired themselves around a system that did not interfere with medical equipment. Japan turned off the last of it in 2023, twenty eight years after the first call.

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