September 20, 2022 Organizing a Study Group on Roaming Among Service Providers in a Time of Emergency

The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) will organize a Study Group on Roaming Among Service Providers in a Time of Emergency to examine a wide variety of measures to secure means of communication in a time of emergency including roaming among service providers for mobile phones and the utilization of Wi-Fi.

1. Purpose

Mobile phone service is an indispensable lifeline for people's daily lives and economic activities, and it remains a challenge to establish an environment allowing for the continuous use of communications service through roaming among service providers, where mobile phone users temporarily use the network of other service providers at the time of emergency such as natural disasters and communication failure.
Particularly for urgency traffic, many of the notifications are transmitted from mobile phones, and there is an urgent necessity to allow the notification receiving bodies to receive the notification even in a time of emergency.
The Study Group will examine a wide variety of measures to secure means of communication in a time of emergency, including roaming among service providers for mobile phones and the utilization of Wi-Fi.

2. Considerations

• 1.
  Scope of the communications covered by roaming among service providers (urgency traffic, general calls, data communication)
• 2.
  Requirements for exercising roaming among service providers (disaster, telecommunications accident, etc.) and the ideal implementation rules
• 3.
  Ideal means of communication in a time of emergency other than roaming among service providers, including the utilization of Wi-Fi
• 4.
  Other

3. Schedule

The first meeting will be held on Wednesday, September 28, 2022, and subsequent meetings will be held in succession.

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  The published material is in Japanese only.