A rapidly restorable phone service to counter catastrophic loss of telecommunications facilities

This paper proposes a phone service system that enables us to rapidly restore telephone service even when the regular facilities for ICT services are catastrophically damaged due to a large scale disaster. In the proposed system, a movable ICT unit with IP-PBX function is deployed to a damaged area; it promptly launches a telephone service based on Voice over IP (VoIP) and WiFi technologies. Users are able to access the telephone service using their own smartphones and telephone numbers, which makes the system convenient to use. The authors develop a prototype system and perform subjective experiments with anticipated users like staffs of telecom companies, local and national government agencies. The results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed system.