What I attend to when a regional network has to keep working

Operators in southern Kyushu plan for typhoons every summer and for earthquakes at all times. My practice starts with a written restoration order, agreed each spring with the municipalities we serve and approved by our board, so that the people working through a disaster are solving practical problems rather than inventing policy. Around it sit the physical preparations: generators, fuel contracts and spares held at 23 sites, crews staged ahead of landfall on the forecast track published by the Japan Meteorological Agency, and accommodation agreements for crews arriving from outside the area. Through the Minami-Kyushu Cable Mutual Aid Council, which I helped found in 2017, operators lend one another crews and equipment on terms agreed in advance. We exercise twice a year with municipal disaster-prevention staff. I do not decide evacuations or set municipal priorities. My job is to make sure our network serves the decisions that municipalities make, and that our board knows what that service costs.

Replacing a coaxial network is less an engineering project than several hundred thousand home visits. Our programme moves one node area at a time: we survey in-home wiring before the visit, brief the neighbourhood association, schedule appointments with households that never asked for anything, exchange set-top boxes and then retire the amplifiers and power supplies behind them. I track cost per home passed, revisit rates, complaints per thousand visits and the fault rate in the months after migration, because a migration that creates repeat faults has only moved the cost. Pole-attachment arrangements with the electric utility and road-occupancy permissions from municipalities set much of the pace, so I spend more time on permits than on technology. The hardest part is older customers who take television only. For them we keep the tariff unchanged, offer a second visit and allow a family member to attend, and we measure whether they still watch the community channel afterwards.

Most of the people who maintain our network are employed by someone else: about 1,350 technicians at 46 firms, many of them small family businesses. I treat that workforce as part of our infrastructure and report its age, depth and safety record to our board alongside how old our equipment is. For our core firms we pay a retainer for committed capacity as well as unit rates, on condition that they train apprentices, meet a safety standard we review jointly and do not subcontract our work beyond one tier. Japan has long-standing rules on fair dealing with subcontractors, and I try to respect their spirit as well as their wording, because an operator's bargaining power over a small firm is considerable. The overtime limits that began to apply to construction work in April 2024 mean surge capacity must come from more trained people rather than longer days, which changes how we plan typhoon season.

Our network operations centre in Kumamoto monitors the whole network around the clock, and most of what goes wrong there is caused by change rather than by weather. I own the change rules: staged release of configuration changes to a small share of customers first, automatic stops when reconnections fail, and a second review for any change moved into an overnight window, whatever the commercial pressure. When an incident is of a kind that Japan's telecommunications rules require carriers to report, we report it to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in the required form, and our audit and supervisory committee receives that same report rather than a softer summary. For customers, the duty manager may publish a first notice within sixty minutes from approved forms, giving affected areas, services and the time of the next update, with restoration estimates expressed as ranges drawn from incident history.

Our seven community channels carry council meetings, school events, local news and, in an emergency, municipal notices that many older residents receive in no other dependable way. Since 2022 they have been played out from a single master control room in Kumamoto, with a backup site in Kagoshima and five local studios where our reporters and crews work. I am responsible for the operating side: playout, the links from studios and municipal offices, equipment life, staffing rotas and the procedures by which a municipality can put an evacuation notice on screen directly. Cable broadcasting in Japan sits within the broadcasting legislation as well as our agreements with each municipality, and I describe our obligations in those terms rather than through clauses I would have to check. We test the disaster insertion route with every municipality each quarter. The editorial choices belong to our programming team; my job is to make sure that whatever they decide reaches the screen in time.