Perils lurk on Japan's mobile superhighway

It's easy to be wowed by Japan's mobile communications infrastructure. "Next-generation" 3G coverage is now so ubiquitous that carriers have already stopped launching 2G phones; an impressive array of attractive handsets offer free digital TV; phones can be used to pay for goods and train rides, thanks to embedded contactless smart cards; and on the mobile information superhighway data whizzes along at 3.6Mbps. But watch out for the off-ramps.

While Japan has led the world with many of the services offered to consumers, in some ways the mobile ecosystem here is downright backward as I found out last weekend when I tried to buy a new phone. A broken handset necessitated a new model and this is where my story begins.

In Japan, phones are sold by carriers and not the phone makers. Companies like Fujitsu, NEC, Sony Ericsson, and a few foreign vendors including Nokia, Samsung, and LG sell their phones in the thousands to carriers. This gives carriers the ability to pretty much dictate to the phone maker what software needs to be installed.

This model is one of the reasons that mobile Internet services like I-mode took off here so quickly. There was no chicken-and-egg situation with phone makers and users waiting for each other to take the plunge. NTT DoCoMo decided I-mode would be in new phones and so it was.

But this model has a downside. Phones are so tightly customized to each carrier that it's not practical to keep the same handset when switching carriers, and if you see a phone you like you can only buy it if it's offered by your carrier.

Back to my story. The new phone was looking quite expensive so I decided to switch carriers and take advantage of a free phone on a competitor network. Japan launched number portability a year ago, so I could make the jump without losing my cell-phone number. I'd still have the hassle of a new e-mail address, but it appeared a small price to pay.

Before long I had a new phone in my hands, but my phone numbers remained locked in the old handset. The new carrier didn't have a cable to hook up to my old phone so they couldn't transfer the address book and it wasn't possible to beam it between the phones. While my old carrier was gung-ho on Bluetooth, my new carrier wasn't so enthusiastic, so the new phone had no support. Similarly, while the new phone offered infrared, the old phone didn't. Heavy customization strikes again.

Back home I fired up my PC and managed to get my address book from the old phone into the computer. Getting it to the new phone via a memory card seemed like an easy task ... but no! The VCard file wasn't being properly read by the new phone. Carriers, it was explained to me when I called the help line, often used custom fields in their VCards so there were sometimes problems. So much for a common standard.

I won't bore you with the technicalities of how I eventually got my address book into my new phone, but suffice to say this story has a happy ending. I'm now back in cruise control, enjoying all the attractions the mobile superhighway has to offer.

The number portability system that enabled me to keep my phone number is coincidentally one-year-old this week. About 3 percent of users in Japan -- roughly 3.7 million people -- have made use of the system during its first year -- far less than the industry predicted, or feared.

One thing that's said to be stopping users from switching is the inability to keep their e-mail addresses. While carriers fussed over the details of keeping numbers, they forgot, or perhaps ignored, the need to carry e-mail addresses between carriers. In other countries this wouldn't be a big deal because most messaging is done via SMS, which relies on phone numbers, but in Japan the advanced stage of the market has again caused hassle for consumers.