Influx of new subscribers briefly paralyzes Softbank

Americans, some of whom still have the nasty aftertaste in their mouths of the nightmarish number portability rollout here, must be feeling for their Japanese counterparts today. After flipping the switch this month to allow folks to take their numbers with them, it seems Softbank Mobile was the big winner -- sort of. In the process of accepting thousands of incoming applicants, their computer system buckled under the load, leaving the carrier all but paralyzed over the weekend and unable to accept sign-ups or cancellations. Fortunately, it looks like their IT folks were on the ball and everything's back to normal now (we hope).

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 30th 2006 1:49PM]

As of Monday, they were still in a state of paralysis.

[DonaldMick Posted Oct 30th 2006 4:17PM]

AT&T Wireless'd

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 30th 2006 4:28PM]

I remember back when this was instated here in the US, AT&T Wireless' systems crashed and it ended up costing the company over $100 million in lost revenue each hour it was down. They never did fully recoup from that financial blow and thus, were bought out by Cingular.

Good luck SoftBank! :]

[(Unverified) Posted Oct 30th 2006 11:19PM]

I contributed to the problem - just switched to Softbank yesterday :-)

got myself a shiny new 12.3mm 706SC, and it came with a free iPod nano too... so far so good Softbank. My old DoCoMo phone just had to go, it was 3 years old, lol