When phones are down, social networking apps take over

By Kim Da-ye

After the 8.9-magnitude earthquake buffeted Japan at 2:46 p.m., DSP Media, entertainment firm, couldn’t reach members of the popular girl group Kara by phone.

Around 6 p.m., band members contacted their management on KakaoTalk, a messenger application for smartphones, saying they were fine.

The group returned to Korea, Saturday, after filming Japanese drama “Urakara.”

KakaoTalk turned out to be useful for many other Koreans staying in Japan and their relatives as phone services were disrupted or cut off in the aftermath of the quake and tsunami.

The use of social network services became widespread with the international media receiving news from Japan via Twitter and broadcasting it.

Google launched Person Finder in both Japanese and English to help located anybody currently listed as missing. On the website, visitors can share information about the person they know or are looking for.

The local media reported that the traffic in cellular and fixed-line networks rose nearly 91 times with too many calls being made at the same time clogging the networks. Some undersea cables are said to have been damaged.

But the Internet in Japan which enables data transfer on KakaoTalk was hardly affected. Some experts say that data travel through a complex, intertwined web that is designed to move traffic to the next free route, preventing the network from overloading.

The telecommunication networks are rather simple with a limited number of cables that calls can be routed to.

The undisrupted KakaoTalk also shows Japan has built a strong Internet network.

“Of roughly 6,000 Japanese network prefixes in the global routing table, only about 100 were temporarily withdrawn from service _ and that number has actually decreased in the hours since the event,” Renesys, an internet intelligence authority, wrote in its blog.

“Internet connectivity has survived this event better than anyone would have expected. The engineers who built Japan’s Internet created a dense web of domestic and international connectivity that is among the richest and most diverse on earth…”

Navid Firouz, a 31-year-old manager at an American IT firm with a Japanese office, tried Friday evening to reach his colleague by mobile phone, but couldn’t.

Firouz emailed instead, and, within half an hour, received a response that his colleague and his loved ones were safe and he wished for everything to go back to normal soon. Firouz forwarded the reply to the human resources team that was communicating with all other Japanese employees via email.

“I really appreciate that apart from daily flood of emails, the most important emails were sent and received in such a crucial time,” Firouz said.

11일 오후 대지진이 일본 동북부를 강타했을 때, 걸그룹 카라의 매니지먼트는 통화를 시도해 봤지만 전화는 불통이었다.

저녁 6시쯤 카라는 카카오톡을 통해 잘 있다는 것을 알려왔고, 그 다음날 무사히 귀국했다.

이번 일본 대지진에서 카라 뿐만 아니라 많은 일본에 머물고 있는 한인들과 그들의 친지 및 친구들이 카카오톡 덕을 본 것으로 알려졌다.

한일 간 이동, 유선 전화의 사용량이 91배가지 증가하면서 전화는 불통이었지만 인터넷망은 거의 문제가 없어 소셜네트워크를 사용한 의사소통은 문제가 없는 것으로 알려졌다.