Discontinued and Repurposed Number Bands - A Mirror of Telecom History
Japan's phone number system has been reorganized again and again to keep pace with changing technology and society. Number bands once used by tens of millions have been retired, or handed to an entirely different purpose, as demand for the underlying service disappeared. Tracing the rise and fall of these bands is essentially tracing the history of Japanese telecommunications.
This article looks at pagers (the 020 band), PHS (the era when 070 belonged to it alone), Dial Q2 (the 0990 band), and the much-debated 0570 band. Read it alongside How Japanese Phone Numbers Work for the underlying structure.
Pagers (020 Band) - One-Way Messaging That Swept Japan
The Pager Boom
A pager, or "pocket bell" as it was known in Japan, was a one-way device that received short messages over the telephone network. Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation (now NTT) launched the service in 1968, and it spread first among business users. In the 1990s it exploded among teenagers, high school girls above all, reaching its peak in the middle of the decade with subscriptions on the order of ten million.
Pager numbers were first assigned from the ordinary numbering space, and only later did the 020 band become theirs alone. Users dialed the pager number from a payphone or a landline and typed a numeric message on the keypad. Number puns such as "0840" (ohayo, good morning) and "14106" (aishiteru, I love you) became a signature of 1990s youth culture.
Decline and End
Once PHS and mobile phones spread in the late 1990s, users moved to devices that could talk back, and pager subscriptions fell away. NTT Docomo ended its pager service, QuickCast, in 2007. Tokyo Telemessage, the last operator standing, shut down in September 2019, closing roughly half a century of history.
As of 2026, the 020 band has been redefined for M2M (Machine to Machine) communications serving the Internet of Things: vending machines, smart meters, industrial sensors, and other equipment that never places a voice call. A band that once carried teenage slang now carries silent machine traffic - a fitting emblem of how quickly telecom moves on. The Evolution of Telephone Devices covers the shift from pagers to mobile phones in more detail.
PHS (When 070 Was Its Own) - The "Simple Mobile" Swallowed by Cellular
PHS Launch and Features
PHS (Personal Handy-phone System) launched in 1995 as a mobile standard developed in Japan. It offered better voice quality and cheaper calls than the mobile phones of the day. The 070 band was assigned to PHS alone, and "a number starting with 070" came to mean "a PHS" in most people's minds.
PHS relied on low-power base stations covering only a few hundred meters each, a microcell design. That gave it excellent indoor quality, and it was permitted inside hospitals where mobile phones were not. At its 1997 peak PHS had about 7 million subscriptions, split among three operators: DDI Pocket (later Willcom), NTT Personal, and Astel.
Losing the Fight with Cellular
PHS was weak exactly where mobile phones were strong: calls made while moving. Because each cell was small, handovers came thick and fast at speed, and calls dropped. As cellular voice quality improved and prices came down, PHS ran out of advantages.
NTT Personal was absorbed into NTT Docomo in 1998, and Astel had withdrawn from every region by 2006. Willcom, later Y!mobile, was the last to go: the shutdown originally set for the end of July 2020 was postponed during the COVID-19 pandemic, and consumer PHS service finally ended at the end of January 2021, closing 25 years of history. A corporate telemetering service for automated meter reading ran until the end of March 2023, and that too has ended.
Repurposing the 070 Band
As PHS subscriptions shrank, the 070 band was opened to mobile phones in November 2013. As 090, 080, and 070 Numbers explains, PHS ended completely at the end of March 2023, so 070 numbers serve mobile phones. Among people who remember the PHS years, though, "070 means PHS" dies hard, and some still treat an incoming 070 call as suspicious. It is a textbook case of a band being reorganized, closely tied to the history of phone number digit lengths.
Dial Q2 (0990 Band) - Light and Shadow of Premium-Rate Services
What Was Dial Q2?
Dial Q2 was a premium-rate information service that NTT launched in 1989. Dialing a number beginning with 0990 delivered recorded information such as weather, stock prices, fortune telling, or live sports results, and the caller paid an information fee on top of the call charge. Providers applied to NTT for a number and took a share of the fees collected from callers.
The early lineup was largely practical, but adult content and dating services soon crowded in. Usage grew sharply in the early 1990s and became a substantial source of revenue for NTT. It also produced a problem: minors running up enormous charges, and billing disputes over calls connected without the caller understanding the cost.
Social Backlash and Regulation
The core issue was that information fees arrived bundled into the ordinary phone bill. Children used the service without telling their parents, and bills of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of yen followed. "Dial Q2 damage" became a social issue in the early 1990s and was raised in the National Diet. NTT added call barring, restrictions for minors, and caps on information fees, but never solved the problem at its root.
As the internet made paid voice information obsolete, NTT terminated Dial Q2 on 28 February 2014. Premium-rate information services on numbers beginning with 0990 disappeared with it.
The Evolution of 0570 (Navi Dial)
Navi Dial (0570) is a nationwide single-number service: a company takes calls from anywhere in Japan on one number, and each call is routed to the nearest call center based on where the caller is. The caller pays for the call, which makes it the mirror image of Free Dial (0120), where the receiving company pays.
0570 numbers were widely adopted for corporate customer support, but they are expensive for the person calling. They sit outside mobile unlimited-calling plans, so a 0570 call is billed separately, and if the queue is long, the meter keeps running while you wait on hold. Assume it is covered by your flat-rate plan and the itemized bill can come as a shock.
What Extinct Number Bands Teach Us
The record of retired and repurposed bands maps the rise and fall of communication technology with unusual clarity. Pagers gave way to mobile phones, PHS to smartphones, Dial Q2 to the internet. The pattern is the same each time: once something cheaper and more convenient arrives, the incumbent service fades fast.
The 090, 080, and 070 bands that dominate in 2026 could follow the same path if the underlying technology is replaced. The Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications decided in December 2024 to open the 060 band, which had not yet entered service as of August 2026. Understanding how the numbering system came to be, starting with why Japanese phone numbers begin with 0, is a useful way to think about where communications go next.