Data plan for your vacation in Japan – Asahi Net

Well, I did it and it worked!  (post needs pictures, I’ll add some soon!)

I went to Japan for a month and had voice and data on my cell phones, for my trip, on a tourist visa, for about $70 total…

…and I paid for it all with my furreign credit card !!!

A few caveats in the fine print:

1) I already owned a Softbank “dumb-phone” and had used it the previous year for a pre-paid sim. Save an extra Y3,000 cash only please at the airport.

2) I had a few old android phones that I knew worked in Japan with their 3G WCDMA bands.

3) I had all the address info for where I would be staying all lined up in advance, including a local phone number.

So if you are just going to visit for 2 weeks, save yourself the hassle and get the $1/day plus insane charges rental sim from Softbank, at the airport and stick it in your unlocked iPhone or android phone. Sure you will end up spending $70-80 or more, Big Deal. Enjoy!

Likewise, if you have a teaching visa or some other residency papers, you might want to consider a data-voice plan, which you can get since you are NOT a dodgy tourist. It will keep for phone from overheating and exploding. (just kidding)

Ok.. Here’s how it all went down.

Voice plan by Softbank pay as you go:

Refill the Softbank flip-phone at the airport for Y3,000. This gives me 2 months of 6Y/sec phoning, text messaging (ask them to activate the text plan) and a year of receive only after that – which will do you no good after you get back from Japan – except that the sim and the assigned phone number will still be valid, so you can activate it again next year.

No, you cannot top it up while out of Japan. Phhhhttttt!

If this is your first time setting up a Softbank phone (or any Japanese phone co.’s pay as you go plan, because you bought one of my wonders, or a friend met you at the airport with their mom’s old flip phone), you will have to drop another Y3,000 in Japanese hard currency to get registered. They will also want you passport, local address, blood sample ,DNA swab and sexual preferences. (Ok, I exaggerate – passport and local address will do) This extra charge kicked in 2 years ago and sucks. I hope the government wises up before the 2020 Olympic games.

On the positive side. the airport Softbank counters can process your outlander credit card. DO NOT ASSUME that the Softbank shop in your local town can do so as well.

Note that Softbank wants a Softbank flip phone for pay as you go accounts. Showing them an old unlocked WCDMA flip phone from home will get the X with the fingers sign. Ditto for another Japanese company’s unlocked phone Showing them the unlocked Softbank ZTE smartphone will cause their little robot heads to assplode, because those smartphones were originally locked not only to Softbank, but to a subset of special data-plan sim that they don’t offer any more. So even though you unlocked it and use it for 2G/3G pay as you go back in the frozen wilds of Canada, they will get confused and refuse to sell you a pay as you go plan.

Domo Arrigato…. (Ok, the counter folks can figure out what you are up to, but rules is rules and no one ever got a bonus in Japan for breaking them)

Besides, the flip phone’s battery charge will last for 2-3 days. Do you really want a battery warning from your power-hungry smartphone when you are calling your only friend in Japan at 11pm to intercede for you with the nice officer who thinks you stole that bike you are riding? …When your breath smells a bit beer-y? Speakerphone ON! Yipe: “Please tell the nice officer you lent me your brother’s bike!”

Flip phone (also called “feature phones”) are for pay as you go voice and SMS text. And for calling 119 when you fall down the side of a cliff.

Android phones are for Data-only plans.

A data only sim (or data only USIM as all sims are confusingly called in translated Japanese correspondence) looks like a regular phone sim, but connect only to a data network. We have these in the U.S. and Canada etc too, we call them Tablet sims.

Basically, a data sim gets you data connectivity, usually a gig or two per month for under Y1,000 plus set-up fee. Some will whack you for extra fees over that use, others will just pro-rate the usage by days and if you go over, clamp the speed down to slightly above dial-up speeds for the rest of that day. Since you can still use Google Maps and upload twitter pix at low speeds, guess which plan type I prefer. If you plan to live-stream a matsuri with periscope, get the former type and pay the overage.

I went with ASAHI NET [http://asahi-net.jp/en/] and their LTE plan [http://asahi-net.jp/en/service/mobile/lte/]

Asahi has English support staff and it cost me all of 6 cents/min on my discount long distance plan to call them at 9pm at night in Canada (10 or 11am Tokyo time, depending on the season) and pester their staff (Hi Bruce!) until I had signed up a month before my trip (note the hard to understand 2 month free sign up campaign) and charged it to my Canadian Visa card (which they confirmed as working). Much fun was also had getting the full address where I was staying into their system (they want the name ??? of the apartment building??) as well as the correct name for the size of the sim I needed for my old smartphone. All in all, after 10 minutes I had confirmation that two envelopes were on their way to my friend’s house and that I would be charged about Y3,000 plus tax or so for 2GB per month plus unlimited slow speed after that. At no time do they need my passport info or anything like that. No voice plan so no chance I would do phone fraud on old ladies, so no passport, blood sample, DNA swab, etc required by law.

Aside: I see they are going up to 3GB in August. Bonus!

Once in Japan, I ripped open the envelopes, inserted the sim and figured out the APN SETTINGS (Access Point Names) deep in the settings section of my phone. A simple version of the settings can be found here: http://asahi-net.jp/en/support/guide/mobile/lte/index.html
You will get a more detailed printed version in the mailed package. You will be the ” Standard settings (dynamic IP address)” one.

Here is another Data-sim provider’s guide, with screenshots,for a general idea.
http://rental.cdjapan.co.jp/contents/en_JPY/SETUP
Of course the names in the fields vary.

Wait for it, punch up the browser and do a Google search. Hooray!
Turn on the GPS, pull up Google Maps… Wow! There I am!

Now for the bad news. If you were a permanent resident, you could have signed up for B-mobile’s Data + Voice plan. You would never, never, never use the voice service, because it costs too much, but your smartphone would not be having conniption fits trying to lock onto a voice service tower signal. It is having such conniption fits right now. There is a sim in your phone’s slot, so that means that something should connect, only it can’t, because the sim is set to refuse all voice service connections. Your phone has now boosted it’s transmit and receive functions to the max and is SCREAMING out for understanding – which it will not get. Meanwhile your battery is getting drained. Fast!

Airplane mode time!

Oh, and I suppose you can do all this stuff with an old iPhone 4 (or 5 -it uses the funny mid-sized sim, the 6 uses the reall teeny tiny one) as long as you have it Jailbroken/ unlocked.

Oh, by the way, a few more info bits. Most of all the data-sim plans in Japan are subcontracted from NTT/ Docomo. NTT used to be a government company and they over-built data capacity like 100 men. So they subcontract it out. But when the sim arrives in the mail, it looks like an NTT/Docomo sim. That’s the way it is. And no, NTT/Docomo is by no means the cheapest.

These subcontractors are all called MVNO’s for some reason.

More on the usual ones here: Read the fine print to see if you can get any plans mentioned on a tourist visa: http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/Japan

So that’s how I did it.

Sure I had to keep the smartphone in Airplane mode when I didn’t need it and yup, it was a bit of a pain to wait until it came  back to life before I could tweet a picture, but it worked. On the day before I flew home I pulled the sim and mailed it back to Asahi Net. Later I found out that I had messed up the cancel notice timing and had therefore bought an extra month of service I couldn’t use, for a total of 2 theoretical months of service that turned into 3, even though I was only there for 1 month, all for appx $40 total, so I could complain, but really, why bother?

I never exceeded my daily slice of the 2GB/month, so I was never slowed down. And I never had to beg for the password for a wi-fi hotspot at a coffee shop either. I was even able to make short Google Voice calls. I switched between 2 old android phones and  tried and tried to connect a certain useless Phablet, and even ran “tethering” on one of them just to see if I could do it. Asahi Net is cool with all this. Some others are not. Read the fine print and ask questions.

And when the tall buildings in one block of Yokohama blocked my data signal, I could still text on my Softbank dumb-phone. Hooray for the department of redundancy, redundancy department.

As Miles O’Brian quipped:
“Never go into battle without multiple redundant backup systems!”

Advanced Class:

For next year I am going to try the Xposed + Docomo Data Sim patch on my new Android 4.4 dual sim smartphone.  I will even see if the old ZTE Star 7 running Android 2.3 (AKA Gingerbread) can be coaxed into running the modified Xposed framework for 2.3 / Gingerbread. If not, I will still keep the old ZTE with me – I have 2 spare batteries for it.

More details on the patch are here: http://www.japanmobiletech.com/2013/08/improved-fix-for-docomo-mvno-data-only.html

Be warned: this is advanced voodoo! Your phone need to be unlocked, “rooted” and you should probably back it up completely before mucking about.  Not quite a rom modification, the “framework” approach stuffs a little extra on top of your phone’s stock Android system, allowing you to load a patch that tells the silly phone transmitter and receiver to calm down and stop looking for voice services because they aren’t any. Data only. Go back to sleep. These are not the droids…

The whole Japan Mobile Tech site is full of neat info, but it is a bit advanced and geared to
folks who live in Japan, on work visas, residency cards, etc. Visit and enjoy: http://www.japanmobiletech.com/

By the way… If you think it is odd that you carry a flip/ dumb/ “feature” phone around as well as a smartphone, check out this recent study. Plenty of folks in Japan do it too, to save big.  See: Cheap smartphone SIM card deals in Japan By Ken Y-N at the What Japan Thinks blog.

Q1: Do you have another communications device as well as the one you use your cheap SIM card on? (Sample size=1,064, multiple answer)

Yes, feature phone	55.5%
Yes, tablet	52.3%
Yes, other	4.5%
No, no other device	16.6%

So that’s a wrap!

Next time, I might detail on what to do when your $45 Ebay Phablet from China turns out not to have the WCDMA bands it claimed to have, or how to convince the local Softbank store staff to “sim-lock remove” your used Softbank ZTE Star 7 smartphone for only Y3,000 plus tax, plus 1 hour of confusion, avoidance and denial.

Hint: Smile and be politely persistent.

 

 

Smartphone blues

Japan HAS begun to shake off the Galapagos syndrome for its cell phones (mobile, for everyone in the rest of the world) ever since the iPhone did a “black ships” routine on their market. Android phones are catching on too, but for the casual short-term visitor, getting a phone AND a data plan without paying and arm and a leg is still a bit of a trick.

And as you may have already found by researching, there isn’t that much in the way of free wi-fi in Japan. When you find it, using it is cumbersome – although folks are trying to fix this for tourists as the 2020 Olympics draw near.

There are two relatively free hot-spot pre-registration tricks available to the tourist user, both are form one or another branch of NTT. One is an Android (perhaps also an Apple) app, the other a tourist-only register on the web, get 14 days deal.

Other “hot-spots” have plans that can run $30-40/ month, and tend to include each other’s networks the more you are willing to cough up.

The Japanese have their own unique as usual solution!

You get one sim (or as they call it USIM) to run your old “real” phone, give you a phone number and do your sms (the fancy name for) texting. Then you get a “data-only” sim/usim for your unlocked smart phone and get more or less usable internet on the smart phone and make all your calls with LINE or Skype. Perhaps you can even get away with using your Android phone’s “tethering” option – turning it into a mini, slow wifi router for your laptop.

The idea is that you pop the data-only sim/usim into the unlocked smart phone or the fancy tablet (usually Android) that also has phone/data sim capability built into it (yup they exist).

This results in some odd only-in-Japan inconveniences:

Above is a pic of a stock cheapie Softbank 003Z, known around the world as a ZTE Blade. If I was to pop my Softbank pre-paid (pay as you go) USIM into it, it would not work. It only works with a special Softbank Data Plan sim – Of which they will not sign me up for because I am only staying for a month or two.

Fortunately, there are lots of resources on the web to get around this, and my personal 003Z has been de-restriction-ed (Softbank prepaid usim works) unlocked (any sim from around the world works) and reloaded (custom Android 2.3 instead of the even older 2.2) Of course I cannot flash this at the folks at the Softbank counter – they would have a fit.

Similarly, the later Softbank Star7 / 009Z (ZTE v882 “Lord”) is a little better of phone:

And I am partial to the floating Dog-dad screen saver (Hooray for Otosan!)

but I have yet to find an unlocker who can deal with it for a reasonable fee – And nooooooo…. wont use a sim wedgie unlock thing, no way… So I can watch PBS Newshour on YouTube on it quite nicely here in Canada – as long as I am near a friendly wi-fi setup, but it will never be my day-to-day phone.

Unless Softbank gets their act together. Or Docomo can unlock it for Y3500 (appx $35) Or I find a local unlocker with one of those magic cable boxes who doesn’t want more than I paid for the phone to unlock it.

On the other hand, I have a few other old Android smartphones. Most are a bit scuffed up; I bought them on Ebay cheap and number unlocked them via Ebay for under $5. (I got interested in Android phones, it’s a hobby) I could bring one of these, or the old Softbank 003Z/ ZTE “Blade” with me and plop a data-only usim into it, while using the usual Softbank prepaid usim and a trusty Softbank flip-phone. About %40-60 of the Japanese public still uses their flip-phones: perhaps they know more about the screwy high data rates and are using this 2 phone trick as well.

Right now I am investigating Asahi Net

Looks like they can rent me a data sim for Y900 a month + Y3000 setup fee and then I can get my Google maps and web service all across Japan. I will see if the fine print works out. They look legit and serious.

WATCH THIS SPACE for updates.

They will of course want a Japanese address, contact, my passport info and a blood sample as all Japanese mobile phone providers seem to want. (ok, perhaps no blood now…)

Here is why the whole mobile phone thing is so complicated in Japan:

Japan suffers from a plague of phone scams and they take extreme precautions to ensure that every single phone in use can be traced back to a human. I already go through all this for the Softbank pay as you go number/ account/ usim in any case and so will you. It keeps the old ladies a teeny bit safer from Ore Ore phone fraud

I should just try to get Softbank to let me put the $1/day (Y100/day) rental sim for iPhones in my Android phone (or even their old 009Z), pay the high Y/second phone fee and the high data plan. It might come out to be about the same… The Softbank rental scheme seems to have a few too many hidden caveats that scream GOTCHA !!! at me.

For now, it is Softbank pre-paid for me, for my regular phone needs. At least incoming calls and texts are free, and it will still take calls for free for a year after the 60 day Y3000 ($30) refill runs out. Of course that only works in Japan, no free roaming reception, darn…

Hmmmmmm….

News has it that Rakutan is trying to set up a mobile (phone) plan that may or may not allow short-term tourist use. I have been sending off emails, sooner or later one of them will get to the correct Rakutan division, but it aint happened yet…

I have been sending emails off to Softbank as well. They hide the email contact form in the Japanese section of their website. you need a lot of Google translate-fu to fill it out, including getting something close to your name in Kana and having a local (friend) contact number, but then you can ask 1000 words or characters or something of questions.

Japanese companies are still a bit scared of foreigners asking questions over the net. Olympics 2020, yup, on it…

In the meantime, I feel comfortable with my old flip phone. And when I pull it out on the train, folks notice and assume that I am not a complete tourist n00b. Just another middle age gaikokujin English teacher. Folks even sit next to me on the train!

Yes! It worked!