The Japanese cell phone company, Soft Bank, has made a name for itself in the last few years for being fiercely competitive and bringing a fresh, technologically savvy approach to its customers and the entrenched, old-school attitudes of its competitors. After its hard-won battle for the iPhone in Japan, its generous all-you-can-eat data plan has made it one of the best providers of the iPhone in the world.
However, as kind as Soft Bank has been, it has found itself as ill-prepared for the demands of its tech-minded iPhone users, who have been using their newfound interweb freedom to gleefully download the entire internet, or something similar, based on the sudden astronomical spikes in data usage.
In order to combat this problem Soft Bank has come to the same conclusion that many companies in the United States have done in recent months: they will continue to advertise unlimited data plans, but with an upper limit (a bit of a contradiction, to be sure). To come to Soft Bank’s defense for a moment, I will say that their data cap is still ridiculously generous; a whopping 300GB of data per month, which they have pointed out on their own page, is the equivalent of downloading 2,500 songs a day for a month.
Reading between the lines, I’ve come to the conclusion that the blame lies with the iPhone 3.0 update, which supports tethering. This feature allows users to treat their iPhone as a modem, which means an always-on mobile connection through the cell phone network. Soft Bank has already said that they have no plans to support this feature due to the heavy demands it would put on its current array of servers, and asked Apple to disable the feature for all iPhones sold in Japan. Typical for the situation, the seething masses of iPhone geeks have taken this as a figurative gauntlet to the face and responded to the implicit challenge with a slew of tutorials on the subject of how to switch on this feature and enjoy all the benefits of unbridled surfing joy and fully realize the true meaning of “unlimited”.
This is a case where I actually sympathize with the company more than the users. While Soft Bank should have seen this coming, their response has at least been reasonable and generous (the aforementioned cap being astronomically high; you could download 37 DVD-quality movies with that much allowance &mdash and this with an iPhone, the use of which would become more of a miserable chore than anything). Rather than giving their users the benefit of the doubt, they could have simply chosen to suspend customers’ service, or cancel their contracts completely. However, they have not only been rather nice about the whole thing, they have also discreetly chosen not to confront the guilty parties directly, in typical Japanese fashion.
In the long run, Soft Bank must keep up with the inevitable advance of progress, and that’s going to mean building out their infrastructure and officially supporting tethering. It remains to be seen if they’ll be faced with competition with the stodgy, proud Docomo, who banks on its name like a Mercedes, no matter how anemic and irrelevant their service has become. For now, Soft Bank, much like Apple, continues to compete mainly with itself, hoping that its forward-thinking approach to the cell phone will continue to bring in new customers, iPhone or otherwise. Here’s hoping they continue to offer their support for their current prices and don’t choose to add some future “premium service” to offset the voracious appetites of the Japanese technorati.
