Blast from the past: my old PHS phone

It's hard to believe now, but there were several periods during the early 1990s when I lived entirely without any kind of telephone. I was living the mildly impoverished student life in the former East Berlin, which was very cheap (the last place I lived in was a 45m2 apartment which cost maybe 12,000 yen a month at the exchange rate of the time). There were some disadvantages though - apart from the coal heating, it was difficult to get a landline until about 1995, because the former East German telephone system was so decrepit Deutsche Telekom decided to rebuild it completely - which took a few years to cover all areas. Mobile phones were around, but it would be another couple of years until they became affordable. So understandably I was quite happy to find on arrival in Japan in 1996 that mobile phones were widely available at reasonable prices.

Actually, true mobile phones were a still little on the expensive side, but this was the era of PHS, aka Portable Handyphone System and commonly referred to as ピーチ (piichi): a sort of cut-price mobile phone system which relies on a dense network of low-power, easily-installable transmitters. That made the system much cheaper to get running and handsets were lighter, but reception was limited mainly to urban areas and even there it was patchy (particularly in my first room in Tokyo). PHS phones also didn't work at high speeds, and were prone to being cut off even at walking speed (although they could be configured in pairs to act as walkie-talkies - maybe useful if you're driving in convoy). There was also a simple SMS-type messaging system which was limited to katakana and the usual alphanumerical symbols; I think this system was compatible with another relic of the 1990's, "pocket bells" (aka pagers). No built-in cameras, internet connections or anything, of course.

At the time there were three major players: NTT, Astel and DDI; and the market was quite competitive. However the inevitable happened: true mobile phones became cheaper and none of the PHS companies was ever really profitable. Mergers and sell-offs followed, with service being moved into niche markets such as data communication, but even that is being superseded by new mobile technologies. PHS is on its way out - earlier this month NTT switched off its network - so I think it's time I finally threw away the handset pictured above.