One million pageviews

Nicholas noticed that the blogger dashboard stats were creeping towards a million page views and figured we'd hit it around mid April. However, I've never fully trusted the information blogger displays, so I checked our actual Analytics account.

Turns out this post is about 300,000 pageviews to slow because it appears that we passed one million quite some time ago. At the same time that the dashboard was displaying 1,000,837 pageviews, Analytics was displaying 1,356,654.

Thanks to all the readers and contributors, we finally have a place to go for reliable English information on Japanese mobile carriers, phones, and plans!

Japanese Mobiles to get 070 prefix from November 2013

Japan uses preallocated prefixes for particular types of phone numbers. Currently, 090 and 080 numbers are reserved for mobile phones, 070 is for PHS, and 050 is for a particular type of IP Phone.

At first, mobiles used only 090 with additional prefixes allocated as needed, starting with 080 in around 2005 and now 070. Only a portion of 070 will be used for mobile; a chunk of numbers will remain PHS.

• Mobile: 070-1 to 4 and 070-7 to 9
• PHS: 070-5 and 6

However, the MIC is considering to allow portability of numbers between PHS and mobiles. It will then not be possible to tell the difference based on the number alone. Plans call for a specific initial ringtone to denote if the destination is PHS. This will be provided by Wilcom, the only PHS provider by November 2013.

MIC information page (J).