According to the report by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, the total talk time on mobile phones in Japan was 1.899 billion hours, a 4.5 percent increase from the previous year. A recent government report on domestic telephone usage in Japan in fiscal 2007 has found that the total time of calls made from mobile phones surpassed that of calls made from fixed-line phones for the first time in history. The number of mobile phone subscriptions at the end of fiscal 2007 was 102.72 million, a 6.2 percent increase from the previous period, exceeding 100 million for the first time in a single fiscal year. Meanwhile, the number of fixed-line phone subscriptions was 51.23 million, approximately half the figure for mobile phones, marking a 7.1 decrease from the previous year.
In addition to the growing number of mobile phone subscriptions, the spread of free call services between users of the same carrier is likely to have boosted the use of mobile phones, the ministry’s telecommunications bureau says.The total number of phone calls in fiscal 2007 was 117.1 billion, a 2.3 percent decrease from 2006, and the total talk time was 4.237 billion hours, a decrease of 2.1 percent
