NTT DoCoMo's I-Mode Disrupted, Affects 7.54 Mln Users (Update1)
By Tomoko Yamazaki
Tokyo, June 14 (Bloomberg) -- NTT DoCoMo Inc., Japan's dominant cellular phone company, said its i-mode phone service was disrupted for about two hours late last night, preventing handset owners from accessing the Internet.
The company said it is still trying to discover what caused the outage, which disrupted service from 11:05 p.m. local time yesterday until 1:18 a.m. today. Voice service was not interrupted. The i-mode service connects cellular phones to the Internet.
``The seriousness of the (outage) depends on whether the company finds a problem in the server or in the network itself,'' said Hiroo Seki, an analyst at UBS Warburg LLC. ``If it is the server, all they have to do is increase the number of servers, but if it is the network, it could be a serious problem.''
All 7.54-million i-mode subscribers nationwide were affected.
The Tokyo-based company in April said it would slow the expansion of i-mode because of repeated disruptions in the service caused by limited network capacity, forcing the company to pull its i-mode advertising until May 26.
The company, which first experienced similar problems with the service on March 28, has been trying to improve the data management software and increase the number of servers.
The company reported 11 disruptions from March 28 through May 24, when it announced it had resolved any existing disruption issues.
DoCoMo compensated subscribers who faced any disruptions during the two months period from March to May by providing discounts on the service fee, which amounted to 640 million yen ($599 million).
NTT DoCoMo introduced i-mode last February. The mobile Internet service allows users to send e-mail, check stock prices, browse the Internet, and make bank transfers on their cellular phone screens.
NTT DoCoMo's shares fell as much as 120,000 yen, or 3.9 percent, to 2.95 million. They ended the morning session at 2.98 million, down 90,000, or 2.9 percent.
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Demand reminds me of AOL early problems.
Jack |
