Photo/Illutration Makoto Takahashi, right, president of KDDI Corp., receives a written administrative guidance, from telecommunications minister Yasushi Kaneko on Aug. 3. (Ayumi Sugiyama)

The telecommunications ministry moved quickly to issue a rare administrative guidance for KDDI Corp. on Aug. 3, ordering the major mobile carrier to take measures to prevent another massive communications network failure.

The order came much faster than it has in the past and, to show it means business, it was issued under the minister's name--the first time the ministry has ever done so over a network failure.

“We took the incident extremely seriously as it was longer and more widespread than past network disruptions,” Yasushi Kaneko, the telecommunications minister, said in handing out the written guidance.

He said the network “should make the utmost efforts to avoid a recurrence with the full awareness that it plays a crucial role in supporting essential societal infrastructure.”

Makoto Takahashi, president of KDDI, replied to the guidance, vowing to make improvements although he conceded that his network will never be impervious to problems.

“We will work harder to keep network trouble close to zero, since it may be difficult to make it zero,” Takahashi said.

The administrative guidance for KDDI was issued only six days after the government received a report on the incident from the company. That compares with the 16 days that it took the ministry to do so when NTT Docomo Inc. similarly experienced major network problems in October last year.

KDDI’s service outage, triggered by maintenance work, occurred on July 2 and lasted for more than 61 hours until July 4. It affected more than 30.91 million KDDI customers.

It was among the largest telecommunications network failures in Japan’s history, and the government has recognized it as a serious incident under the telecommunications business law.

The incident has prompted the ministry to compile a policy, due by year-end, to ensure mobile users will be connected to another available network when communications break down.

The administrative guidance demands that KDDI, one of the nation’s top three carriers, should make thorough preparations when they do system maintenance work and establish proper methods to fix network failures.

The ministry also called on the company to give customers vital information, such as when it expects a network to be restored, in an easier way to understand than it did in the recent failure.

KDDI is expected to report to the ministry by Nov. 10 on how it is tackling those issues.

The ministry plans to summon a panel of outside experts on Aug. 8 to examine why and how the network failure occurred. The panel is scheduled to compile a report on its findings and propose preventive measures by October.

The ministry is also expected to ask mobile carriers to conduct an emergency check on their networks based on the panel's report.

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