世論 What Japan Thinks

Following on from the recent news about Softbank and Yahoo! buying all the outstanding shares of Vodafone Japan, itMedia published the results of a survey into mobile users’ views on Softbank entering the mobile phone market. The survey was carried out over five days at the end of March and the start of April, with 1200 people responding to a private questionnaire over the internet. The survey group consisted of 400 mobile phone users from each of the providers DoCoMo, au and Vodafone. More detailed demographic information, or where the group of users came from, is not stated.

The most interesting result is that for what people hope fill be the outcome of the deal, in particular regarding call and reception quality. It is a standing joke within the English-speaking community in Japan to call Vodafone “Borderfone” because of the perceived poor quality of reception. This survey shows that this is perhaps a valid criticism, as two in five Vodafone users are looking forward to improvements versus just a quarter of non-users.
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Read more on: au,docomo,itmedia,mobile phone,softbank,vodafone

MyVoice carried out a survey at the start of February to find out about the image of various mobile phone companies. This is the fifth time they have carried out this survey, but the first time I have translated one! They interviewed 16,172 members of their MyVoice community by means of an internet questionnaire. 46% of the sample was male, 3% teenagers, 24% in their twenties, 38% in their thirties, 24% in their forties, and 11% in their fifties.

vodafone really has a terrible reputation in Japan, certianly amongst the English speaking community, mainly based around their reception coverage, as they apparently measure reception at the city office of each district in Japan, and if they get a signal there they claim to have coverage for the whole district, or so I have heard.

Note that this survey was taken before the recent news about Vodafone pulling out of the Japanese market (probably) broke.
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Read more on: astel,au,docomo,mobile phone,myvoice,tu-ka,vodafone,willcom