Shinohara The NTT Group's telecommunications equipment suffered immense damage as a result of the Great East Japan Earthquake. The quake caused a great deal of direct damage such as severed lines and shattered mobile base stations, but the largest cause of the transmission failures we suffered was the prolonged power outages.

Oya But doesn't the NTT Group have backup power sources to keep its telecommunications equipment running?

Shinohara Yes, but we hadn't anticipated such prolonged outages, and as backup batteries became depleted on the next day or day after that, we lost transmission over an increasingly wide area.

Oya The disaster made people in Japan realize how dependent we have become on electricity, and how little we can do without it.

Shinohara We too realized that we had left ourselves too dependent on grid power supply, and we've since taken measures such as extending backup battery life by reducing telecommunications equipment electricity consumption and expanding our emergency power supply capacity. Also, we use vehicles equipped with satellite equipment to secure alternative routes during emergencies, and we've recently developed new satellite earth stations that are much more lightweight than previous equipment.

Oya What are the advantages of reducing the weight?

Shinohara The previous stations weighed about 100 kg, making them difficult for just one person to manhandle. The new earth stations weigh about 40 kg, and they can also be dismantled to carry in pieces, which means they can be taken out to where they're needed almost immediately after a disaster strikes. We also equipped them with new capabilities for automatically searching and tracking satellites, and so, unlike the earlier earth stations, the new ones can be operated even by people who don't have any special skills.

Oya That sounds very useful, since there are almost never enough people on hand in emergencies. You certainly didn't waste any time in reducing the weight by over half.

Shinohara Actually, our labs started about ten years ago to look into how to engineer more compact and lightweight equipment, and had already made big strides in component technology. Since the quake, our earth stations have been mobilized more often than before, and it was because our people in the field demanded that we make the equipment easier to manhandle that we got cracking on practical implementation.

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Hiromichi Shinohara
Director of Research and Development Planning Department, Executive Vice President, NTT

Oya You said that you've been working on reducing telecommunications equipment electricity consumption since the disaster. What targets did you set for the NTT Group as a whole?

Shinohara The NTT Group accounts for about 1% of Japan's total electricity consumption. To fulfill our responsibility as such a high volume consumer and help create a low carbon society, we set ourselves the groupwide target of reducing electricity consumption in our office buildings and labs by 30% over the summer of 2011, and went at it tooth and nail. Of course, we made sure that we didn't take things too far and adversely affect our work.

Oya Eliminating wastage doesn't necessarily require you to go overboard, does it? There's no point, after all, in turning off the air conditioner to save electricity at home if you end up suffering heat stroke as a result.

Shinohara You're right. That's the principle at work behind the smart community initiative that we're pursuing — eliminating wastage and enabling smart use of electricity at the local community level without undue hardship. The idea is to link all electrical equipment in the homes and offices of a particular neighborhood through a data network with all sources of power within the neighborhood, including solar systems, wind turbines, fuel cells, batteries and electric vehicles as well as the local power utility grid, so as to enable optimization of electricity supply and demand at the local community level.

Oya The output of solar and wind power systems fluctuates greatly with changes in weather, and that apparently makes a stable supply of power very difficult.

Shinohara Yes, practical implementation will require the deployment of sufficient battery capacity and regulation of demand — in other words, the cooperation of households and businesses in saving electricity — to reduce electricity consumption when electricity is running short. That's why the NTT Group is creating mechanisms for visualizing electricity consumption by each appliance in the home or office so as to encourage people to conserve electricity, and developing the technology required for optimal control of the huge mass of electricity consumption data generated within a community. We're also seeking to achieve the goals of our Group environmental vision, THE GREEN VISION 2020, by doing R&D aimed at reducing environmental impacts.

Oya Technology for smart electricity saving would be immensely useful to society, so I think you should use every opportunity to tell people about your efforts.

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Eiko Oya
Journalist, Director of Oya Soichi Library

Shinohara I'd like to talk also about our initiatives in the healthcare and education fields. We're currently conducting a trial in the village of Hinoemata in Fukushima Prefecture of a remote healthcare consultation system for elderly people. The system enables the only clinic in the village to provide elderly people with health maintenance advice through their TVs. We've also connected the clinic to nearby hospitals to enable the clinic's staff to consult with specialists about diagnosis and treatment of conditions as occasion demands.

Oya Preventive healthcare can also help curb medical costs, so I hope you'll be expanding the service to cities too once the trials are completed.

Shinohara In the field of education, we've developed a system called Koemiru (= “Visible Voice”) that feeds the spoken word of teachers to a speech recognition server for conversion to text that can be displayed on student mobile devices or an electronic blackboard. Starting in January 2012, we conducted a threemonth trial of the system in schools for children with hearing impairments in Tottori and Okinawa. Once the system is fully implemented, we're hoping it will enable kids with hearing impairments to attend ordinary schools.

Oya It sounds like a very worthwhile system. What prompted you to develop it?

Shinohara There's a company in the NTT Group called NTT CLARUTY that helps people with disabilities to participate in society, and we got the idea through talking with the company's employees.

Oya So you could say it was an idea born out of engaging the outside world as well as lab work. I can't help feeling that all businesses should do likewise — that they need to go out and talk with all kinds of people. And when they do so, they also need to translate all those technical terms and so on into plain language that anyone can understand. No matter how outstanding your technology is, you won't be able to offer really useful services unless you can get people to understand its purpose or value. More than anything else, you won't be able to win the trust of others.

Shinohara You're right. We will definitely take your point and do our utmost to engage in sincere dialogue with all kinds of stakeholders to continue creating valuable products and services. Thank you very much for your time today.

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