Japan Update: NTT Discusses Network Recovery

A week after the earthquake and tsunami struck northeast Japan, NTT Group (NYSE: NTT) is still battling to restore domestic fixed and mobile lines to its customers in the affected areas.

Late Friday the national operator's CEO, Satoshi Miura, issued a statement to say that the "severity of damages" from the March 11 earthquake "is of a scale greater than that of any other past disasters," but that the company is "putting all of our efforts into restoring our communication infrastructure, using all possible experiences from the past."

The CEO noted that the earthquake caused 879,500 fixed phone lines, 475,400 fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connections and 6,720 mobile base stations to be disconnected.

Following the past week's efforts, the current disconnections run to 305,400 fixed lines, 68,800 FTTH connections and 1,380 base stations. "With the recovery of power supplies in time, we believe that the course of restoration works will accelerate hereon," the CEO added.

Of course, the operator's mobile division, NTT DoCoMo Inc. (NYSE: DCM), isn't the only wireless operator working to restore its radio access network in the stricken zone -- KDDI Corp. and SoftBank Mobile Corp. are similarly affected. (See Japan Strives to Restore Services .)

KDDI has not published a recent update on its progress, while SoftBank stated Friday that its "restoration work" continues.

The disaster has also affected subsea connections to Japan and is having an impact on the global communications components supply chain. (See Japan Efforts Continue, Impact Assessed, Does Telecom Have a Crisis Management Plan?, Japan's Comms Still Hampered and Quake Rattles Japan Telecom.)

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading