Japanese Earthquakes and 24-hour Battery Backup

In 2011, following the Great East Japan Earthquake, Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications convened a study group composed of the major mobile providers and decided to fortify battery backup for 2,000 locations across the country. Battery backup time was increased to 24 hours for these locations, which are mainly city halls and prefecture headquarters.

The most recent large earthquake (magnitude 7.0) in Japan happened 1 kilometer west-southwest of Kumamoto City. The screenshot below is from Softbank Mobile's site. The Kumamoto City Hall and Prefecture office locations are highlighted in red.



(image: US Geological Survey)

Those locations are listed on each provider's site. Here is an example (in Japanese).

Field Tesing 29% Complete

Beautiful California

California. It's the last week of April -- still snowing in the mountains, but dirt-dry in Owens Lake, off Highway 395 in the Eastern Sierra. At the other end of the state, the rocky shore of the north coast near the border of Oregon. Finally, steel sculptures northeast of Lassen National Park near Burney.

First Week of Mobile Testing

Our drivers are finishing up the first week of testing today (15% complete). Here are some photos.

CalSPEED Still Going Strong!

CalSPEED, our crowdsourcing app, continues to provide a steady stream of data for the California Broadband Interactive Map. Only halfway through April, we have over 140 CalSPEED tests, which is one par with our quarterly average to date.

Spring 2016 Field Testing Has Started

photo by Steven Crews

Monday Evening Sushi Buffet - T-Mobile's "Binge On" Reconsidered

As more people have dug into T-Mobile's Binge On service, it has become clear that it's not as great as it sounds. It starts to look like the Monday evening sushi buffet -- the fish market is closed on Sundays, and all that leftover fish from Saturday night must be sold! Which would you prefer, a $50 steak dinner, or a $10 all-you-can-eat sushi buffet? Depends on your budget and what you're willing to put up with.

My earlier analysis of where you might be likely to stream high definition video using T-Mobile's Binge On service did not take into account the fact that streaming HD video with Binge On may be impossible, because T-Mobile throttles the speed down to 1.5 Mbps. The Electronic Frontier Foundation did a test using Binge On and determined that their video optimization is "just throttling," and that T-Mobile applies the speed throttling "indiscriminately to all video."

Does that make the streaming video coverage map in my earlier post wrong? No, but the only way you will likely be able to receive HD quality streaming video is by disabling the Binge On feature.

Another way of looking at Binge On, suggested to me by a colleague: T-Mobile is simply "incentivizing lower quality video usage … lower load on the network [coupled] with kinda an acceptable level of quality."