NTT Makes Progress in Restoring Services in Quake Zone

Thanks to the efforts of thousands of employees and construction workers, NTT has restored service approximately 90 percent of the exchange offices damaged in the March 11th earthquake, leaving 93 exchange offices and approximately 155 thousand circuits waiting to be restored.


The March 23rd status of disaster relief efforts being made by NTT Group companies is as follows:


The earthquake and tsunamis disrupted commercial power supply and caused equipment failure in approximately 1,000 exchange offices. NTT East responded by deploying emergency batteries, emergency power generators and mobile power-supply vehicles to supply power. However, some exchange offices remained inoperable, resulting in the disruption of a total of approximately 1,470 thousand circuits in telephone subscriber lines, ISDN and FLET'S Hikari (FTTH) services as of 6:00 a.m., March 13 (JST). NTT East, with the help of other NTT group companies and construction companies, comprised some 5,000 people in total, to make an all-out effort to restore these services.



The 93 exchange offices yet to be restored include those with physical damage, flooding or disruption of connection to backbone transmission lines in areas severely impacted by the earthquake and/or tsunamis, and those located in the off-limits area surrounding the malfunctioning nuclear power plant. For these reasons, the recovery of most of these exchange offices is expected to require a significant amount of time.


NTT East has installed 2,076 special public telephones in 615 locations available for use free of charge (as of noon, March 23 (JST)).


For NTT Docomo, 6,720 base stations were disrupted. Recovery efforts have reduced the figure to approximately 840 as of 1:00 p.m. on March 23 (JST).


NTT Communications lost approximately 15,000 IP-VPN and e-VLAN circuits and so far all but 2,300 have been restored.


The company also noted some damage to submarine cables and backup routes were put into service. As for NTT Com's data centers, no damages were confirmed.
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