[ITmedia Mobile] The number of "5G SA" lines affected by DoCoMo's communication failure is 3-4% of 5G users. Is it less than expected? many?

"ITmedia Mobile Weekly Top 10" aggregates the number of article accesses per week on ITmedia Mobile and introduces the top 10 articles. This time, we have compiled and summarized the data for 7 days from November 5th to November 11th, 2026.

The most accessed article this time was an article that featured a recovery report from a communication failure in NTT DoCoMo's ``5G SA'' that occurred on November 5th. A similar problem occurred on November 11th.

5G communication services are broadly divided into "NSA (non-standalone)," which relies on LTE (4G) equipment, and "SA (standalone)," which uses equipment independent of LTE. In the case of Docomo, unlike au (KDDI/Okinawa Cellular Telephone) and SoftBank, it is treated as an optional service for the 5G SA communication plan, and even if you have a 5G SA compatible terminal, you will not be able to connect to the 5G SA network unless you apply for the option.

Among Docomo's 5G communication plan lines (subscribers), this outage only affected lines that subscribed to the 5G SA option. According to the materials presented at the briefing held on November 6th, up to about 1,587,000 lines were affected by this failure, which is about 3 to 4% of Docomo's 5G subscribers (including MVNO lines).

Assuming that ``the maximum number affected = the number of subscribers to the 5G SA option'', I thought, ``It's surprisingly small...'' considering that current terminals are basically compatible with 5G SA.

As mentioned earlier, 5G SA is an option for Docomo, and if you do not sign up for the option, you can communicate with NSA. Considering this, it can be said that there are a surprising number of people who go out of their way to sign up for the 5G SA option.

Do you feel that the number of affected lines (up to approximately 1,587,000 lines) is a large number? Or did you feel it was less?