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Games Entertainment

NTT To Send Movies, Games Via Fiber-Optic Network 71

Posted by timothy from the and-they-have-underwear-laundries! dept.
acehole writes: "Sony Corp and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT) will join forces to provide movies, games and other products to households via a fiber-optic network and Sony's video game console PlayStation2. Sony hopes to use the service around the country (Japan) in full service by around 2001. A small story about it can be read here." From the article, it's unclear how deep in the network the fiber goes; anyone have more information on that? I'd like some fiber to my apartment, but it's rather far from Japan right now ...
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NTT To Send Movies, Games Via Fiber-Optic Network More

NTT To Send Movies, Games Via Fiber-Optic Network

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  • Primal Scream (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Arghhhhhhhh!

    Taco, Hemos and others. How about some other stories that aren't rehashes of the same old discussions? These are getting wearisome.

    Think of something fresh to post! For the love of humanity!!!

  • "Sony are"? (Score:1)

    by mfh ( 56 )
    It seems that every single day I see this awkward use of the word "are" at least 3 times.


    "Apple are", "Sony are", "MPAA are".


    I don't see how this could possibly be correct. Shouldn't it be "Apple is", "Sony is", "MPAA is"? When you're referring to the people of sony, the proper word to use is "are". Example:


    Q: Apple is releasing OS X soon?

    A: Yes, they (the people of Apple) are.



    - Mike Hughes

  • I recall something very similar to this happening in Japan with the SNES

    Ya know, there were video game consoles before the NES. Even back in 84/85 Coleco was talking about downloading games over modems. Back then CV games were 8K-32K tops, easily doable even at 1200 baud. And the idea failed miserably. It will again. Nobody wants pay per play. Never will. But I guess those who do not remember, much less learn from history.....

  • I knew this NTT/Sony story sounded familiar:

    Modem by AT&T/Coleco.
    Not to be confused with the ADAM modem, which does exist.
    An article in Newsweek, September 19, 1983, on page 69 announced the following:

    'American Telephone and Telegraph Co. and Donkey Kong? An unlikely combination, perhaps, but one that became a reality last week when the venerable communications giant hooked up with Coleco Industries, the videogame maker, in a join effort to make entertainment software available by telephone to 25 million owners of video games and home computers.'

    'Under the plan, AT&T and Coleco will develop a "modem", an electronic device that will connect a home computer or video game by telephone to a central data base. Coleco will supply the software programs, such as Donkey Kong or two of its other popular video games, Smurf and Zaxxon. The service will be offered sometime next year for about $20 a month; the modem is expected to cost $100.' - 13

  • ptical hardware is expensive at the 20 Gig level, but you're not gonna get 20 gigs. You'll get a frac channel at about 100 mb to start, with bandwidth expandable. Remember, there's gonna be a trunk carrying all of the channels, and each individual run (i.e. to your house) will have far more limited bandwidth. The equipment that works on the user level is pretty damn cheap. The only reason Ma' Bell doesn't have fiber running right to your door now is because the equipment to bring it to your door isn't cheap, is very fragile, and they've had problems keeping it running for reasonable amounts of time. It just became feasible to bring fiber to buisness in he past decade or so, actually, closer to the last 7 years.

    -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
    Version: 3.1
    GIT/CC/MU/S d-(---)@ s++:++ a23 C(++++) ULBSC++++$ P++>++++ L+++>++++
    E---(-) W+++(--) N++>+++ o++(--) !K w--- !O M V- PE(-) Y++@ PGP++ t--- 5--
    X++ R-- tv b++>+++ DI++@ D++ G e h-- r+(*) y++(-)>$
    ------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

  • NTT has a fiber network initiative called Global Multimedia Network (GMN). There are a number of ways to look at it:

    1. It's just a big ATM over fiber backbone for the Internet, plus it carries broadcast TV signals to regional broadcast facilities and other big bit-moving jobs networks of that kind do.

    2. These guys really believe they can revive a pre-Internet world of specialized proprietary networks for, e.g. Playstations. Uh huh. Yeah. Right.

    3. By blasting enough money at the problem, even if they have not defined the problem very clearly, they may end up with a kick-ass fiber-to-the-curb VDSL network that does telephony and Internet access really well, with a funky multimedia part nobody uses tacked on.

    4. The Verio acquisition signals they get it, and know they need to recast GMN in an Internet light. Or, they don't get it and bought Verio to put a fig leaf over that.

    Ironically, by building what could be a great Internet system, they obviate the need for separate multimedia-over-ATM-to-the-home hacks. They also import competition from all over the world in the form of Internet multimedia their proprietary network is unlikely to beat for choice and price.

  • NTT is deploying a technology called PON, or Passive Optical Networking, developed by Lucent (and, AFAIK, still proprietary to them.) PON allows the laying of fiber pairs from a central wire office (CO in the US) to boxes in neighborhoods, which run fiber pairs to the NID on the side of the house. It's called Passive because none of this equipment requres outside power, except the equipment at the CO and the CPE (Customer Premise Equipment). To my knowledge, NTT plans to deliver ATM-25 connections out of the CPE (along with RG-6 video and RJ11 POTS service) to serve data.

    How do I know this? Bellsouth is running a trial of the very same technology in a *small* area of North Atlanta. At this writing, only data is being served (PPPoE back to Bellsouth.net, in keeping with ADSL tariffs), with technical discussion on how best to provide the other services (for example, if you lose power, so does the CPE, which kills lifeline 911 service..).

    The real niftiness about it all is that every lamda on the fiber is another OC3 of bandwidth. And the light spectrum as a lot of lamdas. The not-so-nifty bit is that it's Lucent proprietary.

    I wouldn't expect regular deployment of this in the US until probably 2005.

    ex-ILEC-engineer,
    Phrack




    --
    Never knock on Death's door.
    Ring the doorbell and run
    (He hates that).
  • As an American, I am shamed to be living on the same continent as all you ignorant fucking racists. Who are we to judge wether another country deserves high-speed access? Funny how these same ignorant people have no idea how little of the real-high tech shit never makes it to the US. Anyone who has been to Japan and regularly follows their technological innovations knows how behind the times the US is in terms of bringing technolgy to market. It actually disgusts me. Every Asian and European country, including Mainland China, has far superior wireless availabilty. How many LCD / PDP TVs do you see in the US? How bout Digital VHS? Recordable DVD video machines? Cellphones with color screens+video conferencing+on-demand MP3 music+GPS+64/128kb data native at half the weight of your so called "minature" US cellphones? What country has DVD+TV+GPS navigation as standard equipment in 1/3 of their cars? Who makes game machines with 4x the performance of a maxed out PC at 1/4 of the cost? Whos the leader in robotic technology? I think I've made my point.

    That earlier post by some "japanese citizen" regarding high-speed availbilty in Japan is either really ignorant or just likes making shit up. Prices are not nearly that expensive. ALL phone lines in Japan are ISDN! Every public phone in Japan has an ISDN jack. Its been that way for at least 5 years. Cable modems/DSL is available in Japan, but I have a feeling that flat rate 64/128kb wireless PHS data service that has been available for over a year and that any cellphone supports natively, will probably become the norm. NEC also has a flat-rate satellite based product just like DirectPC. So there's lots of options.
  • I work in the same building as the leading fibre laying company here in Stockholm, we've talked about Japans fibre structure. Apperantly Japanese fibrecompanies, lay something like nx1024 fibres at atime, they also weldge them together at the same time this will get you pretty crappy performance, because there really isn't any good way to join 400+ cables at one time.

    Oh well they have absolutley no shotage of fibres in Japan, I promise. And talk about bandwith, right now they have a teoretical max beandwith of atleast 80 PetaBytes/s between Tokyo and Osaka.

  • $100, for the tx/rx modules. And then about $200 for the card. This isn't that expensive, I mean imagine massproduction for the home user market, and they can produce tx/rx that emmits diffrent colors wich will make it possible for 500 ppl to share the same outgoing channel.

  • Re:Fiber (Score:1)

    by emj ( 15659 )
    You can join 412 fibres in 10 minutes, this is including the time for testing and such. They do it at a much larger scale in Japan, but not with the same quality. But way back (5 years ;-) in Brittain it took something like 3 days to join 400 fibres, and it took 4 people. Now you usally work in pairs, you can do it on your own, but there are rules.. ;-)

  • ATM (Score:1)

    by emj ( 15659 )
    Doesn't ATM suck big time when you are talking about homeusers, I mean ATM switches are so goddamn expensive (Because of all the buffer memmory required). I would love to see DTM in a City wide Network, being developed by Net Insight [netinsight.net], and Dynarc.
  • Gee, I hope in the future it turns out to be as good as you say. I've had one since they first came out, and aside from 2 or 3 weeks of playing Ridge Racer 5 until the cows came home and about 3 current DVD's (hint: they don't carry all the DVD's in rental stores that they carry VHS tapes for), the unit has been collecting dust and hasn't been turned on in months.
  • Anything that exponentially increases someone's probability of ending up on Jerry Springer can't be good
  • Re-wiring households with fiber is NOT too expensive. There are several companies out there that are deploying fiber-to-the-home equipment right now.

    The cost of the actual fiber in the ground is about the same as copper lines. Actually the cost of the cable is almost nothing compared to the cost of installing it. Because trenching new cable into neighborhoods is the biggest cost, don't expect to see this in your mid-life neighborhoods any time soon. Do expect to see it in new subdivisions, and older neighborhoods that are moving from telephone poles to below-ground installations. Since they are already running the DitchWitch in those neighborhoods, they might as well put in fiber, because then they don't have to come and do an upgrade in 10 years, AND they can sell the subscribers a lot more services right now.

    As far as the equipment goes - the most expensive part is those lasers and optical receivers. As we all know - the electronics that hook up to them keep getting cheaper and cheaper.

    The bandwidth that a Fiber-to-the-home network gives you is incredible. I believe that this will be a disruptive technology in that the big jump in access bandwidth (100x over most cable-modem or DSL technology) will transform the net.

    Disclaimer - my company makes Fiber-to-the-home equipment and the options I have are worth crap if this is all false.
  • Sorry, I live in USA.
  • If posting this kind of comment makes you happy, you seriously needs to seek help. My sympathy to you.
  • I designed the artwork for a NTT website back in '98. Does that make me cool in any way? Just wondering...

    Scott
    Broadcast Designer
    Fort Myers, FL
    (BTW Hurricane Gordon is here now!!!)
  • Your treating it as the Playstation 2 is a weak assed machine. It isn't. It will probably give most PCs a run for its money for a year or two after it comes out. And sony has previously said before that they want the Playstaton 2 to be much more than a game machine basically they see the system as a eventual replacement for entertainment as we know it. Its gonna do tons of things such as act as a webtv box, limited PVR functions (with the HD), viewable entertainment (DVD) as well as other things. They want the market to be split, because they want the machine to be seen as a replacement for most anything.
  • Oh and cable connectivity is very cheap in Japan, you can get from 256Kbps to 15Mbps, for perhaps $50/month, depending on the cable provider in your area (in Tokyo). Anybody with line of sight from West Akabane?
  • Post in MIME?
  • Oh man, that was a good one. :)
  • I'm not from Japan, I'm from Virginia so I'm not
    speaking with any authority on this but I recall
    I've always heard how in Japan most of the
    companies are run much as the US mafia is. with
    families of companies being joined together.
    Just from what I've read here from Japanese
    citizens reminds me of that and i was wondering if
    that is a factor here with NTT. just thought i'd
    throw that out.
  • My worry is that after the exposure the DeCSS code has gotten, all large collections of hex will be mistaken as parts of subversive, illegal programming.

    At least they can't take away octal.

    ---------///----------
    All generalizations are false.

  • i an so fucking drunk right now.
    i dont' even rememebmer ehat thids articlal isw abolut.. but it sAID NT in the title so it must be jharshly pro linux, caue yoyu know, this it /. and it's alwaye pro linuex
    and i saent apgp 's email to linux toravakds yesterday wht said yo,m and fan amial an shuit,

    and i'm talonyx and i would log in execept i dont well cactaually i do rememebr my password, and i hve 30 karnmas ti so i can post this without worrying about my karma and shit and hwwrre did i put that other beerm nman ut was mine

    ok well i dunnom but imna log in i hghope is dont spell int wron

  • There is a time and a place for everything. Guess what? Childhood is not the time for sex, and Slashdot is not the place to forward your agenda.

    We do not harm children, we love children, and would give our lives to prevent any harm to a single child

    So give up your life of pedophilia.

    For your sake, I hope you're just a troll and not real.

  • Begin American Jealous Technogeek rant
    are we sure we can trust people with this kind of broadband? I mean jeez! everyone is going to hack their Playstation 2 to become a DoS box because that is SO much more fun then playing games or having an awesome service. Like, have these people EARNED the right to have this service?

    Yah know....Whatever
    /Begin American Jealous Technogeek rant
  • I don't think you understand the dynamics of the japanese market. japan has never heard of antitrust, price setting above the table happens all the time, patent stealing is a business and businesses are run like mafias. japan isn't a dirty business culture its just very different by our [western] standards. rob
  • Sorry but NTT has zero credibility in these types of announcements. They have great labs, world-class researchers, stunning prototypes, but have a less than stellar record in rolling these things out to the masses. Given the density of Japan's population, you'd think they could figure out a way to execute on these types of services and make some yen in the process.
  • not quite as good as AI, artificial gravity, and interplanetary star ships, but hey, what ever.

  • Fiber? (Score:1)

    by LNO ( 180595 )
    I wanted fiber in my home, but I'm pretty poor- the best I can afford is to install Grape-Nuts in my colon.

    I should see if there are federal funds to help people like me.

  • You are being lied to! The corporate powers that control the American economy have been fooling the public of this great land of ours for decades!

    I'm not making this up! Read the ingredients some time. There's no grapes and no nuts in it!

  • Yes, that's exactly what I meant :)

    -- Sig (120 chars) --
    Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
  • What you need to do is connect the central offices and satellites with fiber...
    You'd need a LOT of fiber in order to do that :)

    -- Sig (120 chars) --
    Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.
  • This falls into one of the things that will become possible once NTT actually delivers fiber to each home in Japan. They have been working on this for a while.
    But please do not get too excited: NTT is making aLotOfMoney with their plain old telephone service to connect people to the internet. It will take some 'competition' (There is a company offering ADSL in some parts of Tokyo now) to make NTT deliver on its press releases.
  • this brings to mind the satilite addon for super famicon and the sega channel, both of which failed badly. this however is high bandwidth and may work out, but why not just make it an internet serivace?
  • It sounds just like cable to me. :-)
  • I Have heard of devlopemt of a new hard ware that uses Fiber but costs a lot less then what we use today. But I think that it was not going to be ready for home use or even ISP use for 3 to 4 years.
  • Maybe if it had even a hundredth of the functionality of a PC it would be worth it, but on a PS2? What's the point?

    I couldn't agree more. I still get annoyed when I see people using Sony CD players to listen to audio CDs. They don't have one millionth the power of a PC with a DVD-ROM drive, I mean what's the point?

  • Damn right, he's a flammer.
  • And who needs 20 gigs of bandwidth coming into their Playstation 2 of all things? Maybe if it had even a hundredth of the functionality of a PC it would be worth it, but on a PS2? What's the point?

    Well, I think they want to send movies and PS2 games over the network. Not HTML poker.

  • I ain't no stinkin' troll...
  • Thanks for your support, we need people to counter the FUD about us.
  • What's a flammer, is it like a hammer? When you're done denying your own repressed sexuality, come back and post something intelligent.
  • Fiber is much harder to join than copper wire (needs special equipment, you can't just twist the end together like you do with a wire :) )... So this isn't as easy as it sounds.
  • See? My point exactly, asshole.
  • Maybe I should give the Jerry Springer show a call. Any other ideas for media outlets that support "contraversial" material?
  • No the American Psychological Association you dimwit.
  • 4,000 yen a month in Shizuoka. When I lived in the city I couldn't get cable service, I moved out to Inaka and I get 350K cable service 24/7. The install was expensive though... 80,000 ouch. Are you sure there isn't any cable service in your area? Which prefecture?
  • The continuing irony as high-tech companies like Sony develop tech (mp3 players anyone?) to fill market demand while the RIAA and MPAA go nutty trying to litigate less damaging technologies developed by open/free folks.

    Not unlike the .mp4 report at Tom's detailing how a DVD will fit with little visible loss on a CD using mp4 compression. ooops.

    A stronger force than the inevitability of technology developments, is the consumer demand driving hardware manufacturers.
  • You forget, my friend, that Sony is a major player in the MPAA [mpaa.org]. And they're in the RIAA [riaa.org], too, for that matter. Stick that in your smarmy pipe and smoke it, eh?

    Let the conspiracy theories commence!

  • Sending videos over fibre-optic networks and playing them on PSX2s? Nobody tell the MPAA.

    Are you joking? The MPAA would love this. It's just the infastructure they need to stream the video to you and make you pay each time you watch it. Hell, Sony might just stop releasing PSX2 games on CD and just stream the game to you each time you play it! Then of course they can send the information about how often you play it to the respective manufacturer, for a nominal fee...

    --
  • Being citizen of Japan, everytime I hear these story, I need to sigh.

    Japanese goverment and its ex-goverment owned monopoly (NTT) has been talking about "Fiber to home" sh-t for more than 5 years. That was an excuse not to implement any DSL or cheap ISDN service,

    Not Korea has very good high speed Internet access while Japan has some ISDN but still practically no real high speed access. It happened because of goverment incompetence.

    Both country shares similar urban STRUCTURE and there should be no excuse by NTT.

    They can talk any bulls--t and make story for digital contents (Which I did not bother to read) but I am very skeptical about it.

    Some facts.

    In Japan, Local call costs about $9/3 min from home phone, $9/min. from public phone. Getting new line installed, expect to shell out $1000 and wait for 4 weeks. Unlimited night time discount call option costs $50/month. Dou you get picture how NTT being so rich. <b>MONOPOLY</>.

    So much for rant.

  • No press release at Sony, but a little more information from this morning's Yomiuri Daily News (not on their website). Apparently NTT will only provide a fiber connection for a group of homes, to save money, as predicted by two earlier posters. Sony will provide the music and other software contents.

    You can slag the big boys but it does cost a lot of money to develop these machines, one false move and companies can go under. In one fell swoop Sony basically created the DVD market with Playstation 2 sales.

    Also, not in the article but noticed that in March NTT Docomo bought into Playstation.com Corp. (which was set up in Feb.) to use I-Mode service to distribute software to Playstation terminals. Possibly I-Mode would just be a way to spread news about new titles, and handle ordering and billing (download before you get home?) but there is no security in most of those phones yet. Newer phones I believe have 40 bit RSA. Also the new EZ Web
    phones which use a competing service from I-mode,
    have 40 bit RSA from Phone.com in Japan. Using I-mode to unlock games from DVDs might be a bigger business than fiber downloads for a while, but the unlocking business hasn't taken off in Japan when it was tried in the past.

    NTT has only in May and due to competition started an almost reasonable ISDN service, 64K unlimited use for I think $50/month (ISP charge separate). But NTT Metallic and other companies are coming out with DSL, and the best deal is Cable if you can get it (I can't living 3 minutes from a major train station but silly me, on top of a hill behind an old temple.. no cable).

    Looks like we're inching towards William Gibson's "deck". But first things first, gotta sell a lot of movies!
  • A month of heavy 64K use, i.e. slashdot, open source development, etc. I have found runs just about the same as the OCN economy 128K 38000 yen fee. Now, that is. I once got screwed by OCN (64 Kbps again) for 1200 bucks for a month, when the NTT built soho router (early adopter..) dialed out and wouldn't hang up, every time Windows wanted to poll Microsoft or some such idiocy. Also had NTT come make a sales call for some hair brained scheme to lower my bills, except that if you make lots of small dialup calls from an autodialing router/ta (ntt's of course) you probably pay a heck of a lot more. Asked for proof this was not a scam and never heard from them again.

    Where you live you probably don't have IP Setsuzoku service, though you might want to ask again. That is the 64K service just rolled out for all of Tokyo in May, for what was it around 6000 yen? I had to sign up for it but was furious at the same time.. since I had also checked with their competitor ODN, which depended on ports which were actually at NTT's OCN service. NTT was screwing with them so that ODN (this was Shinagawa area, 1999) had to say they had no lines available for 3 months but OCN said they could come install right away (i.e. 1 month).

    NTT of course didn't know about a deal that the ISP DTI (Dream Train Internet, Mitsubishi Elec.) had where you pay another 80 bucks a month for static ip.

    If there is any way at all not to use NTT and get useable service let me know (started an ISP in Tokyo 1994 and NTT was killing us then too of course). Spread spectrum or net over utility lines in the next year or so is not total fantasy, so long as NTT isn't doing it.. Keep an eye on Sony!
  • I think they ment that as a (bad) joke ie. orbiting satelltites, but I think everyone knows what you really mean.
  • Most Japanese people gawk in amazement whenever I mention that back home in America, we can call "all the way across town" for free. The usual question is "But if NTT did that, everyone would use the phone". (at this point, I shake my head and say -- So??!!?) (Email me for more on this rant -- it doesn't really belong here).

    Competition is a healthy thing. Last month, NTT announced a "breakthrough" price discount for local long distance calls. Basically, I can call from northern Japan to southern Japan for 60 yen instead of 80 or 90. For some reason, it still only costs 40 yen (or less) per minute to call to the US. The only reason for the price break is that the government is moving to allow competition, and NTT had to appear to be making an effort to meet the other companies' prices.

    Anyway, all information coming out of Japan regarding the internet is first passed through some sort of reality distortion field.

    The gov't here thinks that having a plan is the most important thing. For example, their newest plan is to overtake the US as the internet leader in either 2002 or 2003. Seriously. This jibes with the 'plan' announced in the main story. I'll start paying attention when these "plans" turn into "implementations".

    Another oft-quoted statistic about Japan's internet growth is the number of wireless internet subscribers. If the Japanese government thinks that they can truly catch up to the US by stocking the 20-something girls in Shinjuku with phones to send mail to each other arranging meeting times/places, then more power to them. The amount of "real" wireless internet accesses that is going on is miniscule.

  • I'd like some fiber to my apartment, but it's rather far from Japan right now ...

    You don't need to go to Japan, silly! Just go to your local grocery store and pick up a box of Bran Flakes. They're an excellent source of fiber!
    ----
  • I know I'm not the only one that thought that said "nipple telegraph".

    ...

    Okay, I hope I'm not the only one that thought that said "nipple telegraph".

    ---------///----------
    All generalizations are false.

  • Holland Michigan is actually sitting on a similar network [egl.net], though it's currently only accessible to large companies [that's the best link I can find at the moment... sorry]. Within the next year AT&T ought to be using it to serve CATV and (hopefully) @home service to residences. Word is that phone service is running on fiber on the rapidly developing north side of town (a lack of copper is the standard justification there for the unavailability of DSL, which just made an appearance in town this summer).

    Though growing rapidly, Holland is still in many ways a backwater... I can't imagine the presence of a fiber network is an isolated situation in the US as a whole. IOW, we may be far from Japan, but I suspect there's a growing infrastructure in the US for this kind of thing, even if it's still rare.
  • Write a good post, then post it again with the HTML tags done properly. Get moderated up on both! I intend to double-post all my thoughts in the future, the first time with malformed HTML, the second, fixed. Thanks for the tip!

  • Where does that leave other manufacturers? If all games, movies, etc., are put into a Sony format for the fiber-linked PS2, then what about Hitachi, Magnavox, Sega, etc.'s products?

    Also, are we going to see another war here like we saw for cable and DSL? Internet Service Providers are still fighting for the right to share cable networks in many areas. Who will have the right to be a provider for the fiber line that runs to my house? Likewise, who will have the right to develop programming for this PS2-based entertainment network?

    My first instinct is that I don't like this idea. Centralizing content into five or so conglomerates is bad; only having one main source of information is worse.

  • I recall something very similar to this happening in Japan with the SNES - the SatellaView [dekutree.com].

    -- Sig (120 chars) --
    Your friendly neighborhood mIRC scripter.

  • A Prediction. (Score:3)

    by JabberWokky ( 19442 ) <slashdot.com@timewarp.org> on Saturday September 16, 2000 @06:40PM (#773976) Homepage Journal
    .
    My SO works for Verio, and came home about two weeks ago with the NTT "Welcome to the Company" glossy book.

    NTT has just about finished their merger (in my eyes, buyout) with Verio, the Borg of the ISPs. Verio has a nice high number of customers, but much more important, it has a significant geographic coverage with high bandwith negotiated or owned across America and elsewhere, and the support infrastructure. They have high level deals with Microsoft and other large corporations, and bought uber-server hoster Hiway Technologies over a year ago (which is where my SO was working).

    Wanna guess who I predict will provide Sony PlayStation2's United States connectivity?

    --
    Evan

  • Fiber & Wire (Score:3)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @06:11PM (#773977) Homepage
    I can't speak for Japan, since I've never been there. But I have some ideas.

    In the US, newer neighborhoods/subdivisions are being wired with satellite substations from the all-important "Central Office". The trunks connecting the Central office and the substations is FIBER. From the substation [or Central office itself in order areas] the wiring is all copper.

    And so I expect it to stay. Rewiring to households is just too expensive, and fiber transceivers are still expensive. What you need to do is connect the central offices and satellites with fiber, and run copper from there.

    What you also need to do is put good data compatible equipment inside the central offices and satellites. This is where the US falls down, at least in my case. I can only get 26.4 kbps and IDSL until SWBell fixes some equipment. The fiber is already there.

  • Re:Fiber & Wire (Score:3)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @06:28PM (#773978) Homepage
    AFAIK, it's already done. Most of the inter-exchange trunking is already fiber. It's very easy to do since most cities have less than a dozen central offices, and you don't need to connect every CO to every other.

  • Uh-oh (Score:3)

    by AntiNorm ( 155641 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @06:04PM (#773979)
    Sony Corp and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT) will join forces to provide movies, games and other products to households via a fibre-optic network and Sony's video game console PlayStation2

    Sending videos over fibre-optic networks and playing them on PSX2s? Nobody tell the MPAA.

    =================================

  • Fiber... hahahaha (Score:3)

    by piku ( 161975 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @06:04PM (#773980) Homepage
    Sure fiber itself is pretty cheap to buy and lay, but the equipment that you use with it is helluva expensive! How to they plan on making this affordible?

    And who needs 20 gigs of bandwidth coming into their Playstation 2 of all things? Maybe if it had even a hundredth of the functionality of a PC it would be worth it, but on a PS2? What's the point?

    This is just more Sony bull. They are going to split up their own Playstation 2 market with all these addons so bad its not even funny.

  • But... (Score:3)

    by N8Magic ( 196335 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @06:05PM (#773981)
    This is not the newest technology around. The company I work for has been experimenting with this for some time now, with High Speed Internet, TV, Phone, all over one one high speed connection.

    The way that the "fibre network" in the article is described, is a bit misleading, however. The local Telco/ISP/Cable Provider won't be dropping fibre into everybody's house, rather, they drop it to the distribution box in your neighborhood (not the one in the backyard, but the one that serves the whole neighborhood.) That solves the distance limitation of DSL. Or if you are in a big apartment building, they will drop fibre and an ADM in the basement of the building.

    Basically, with such a short distance from the fibre to your dwelling, they can crank up the speed to 15Mbps or something like that, and all the services are streaming over that.

  • Re:Goverment, aha.... (reality check) (Score:5)

    by OA ( 65410 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @07:08PM (#773982) Homepage
    Sorry, I posted without reviewing. (Should have pressed preview)
    ---------------------------
    Being citizen of Japan, every time I hear these stories, I need to sigh.

    Japanese government and its ex-government owned monopoly (NTT) has been talking about "Fiber to home" sh-t for more than 5 years. That was an excuse not to implement any DSL or cheap ISDN service,

    Korea has very good high speed Internet access while Japan has some ISDN but still practically no real high-speed access. It happened because of government incompetence.

    Both country shares similar urban STRUCTURE and there should be no excuse by NTT.

    They can talk any bulls--t and make story for digital contents (Which I did not bother to read) but I am very skeptical about it.

    Some facts.

    In Japan, Local call costs about $9/3 min from home phone, $9/min. from public phone. Getting new line installed, expect to shell out $1000 and wait for 4 weeks. Unlimited nighttime discount call option costs $50/month. Dou you get picture how NTT being so rich. MONOPOLY.

    So much for my rant.

  • You'll get fiber in the U.S. before I do in Japan! (Score:5)

    by HardFocus ( 87842 ) on Saturday September 16, 2000 @09:21PM (#773983) Homepage

    > From the article, it's unclear how deep in the network the fiber goes; anyone have more information on that? I'd like some fiber to my apartment, but it's rather far from Japan right now ...

    I live in a medium-sized (900,000 people) urban centre in central Japan and I have about as much hope of getting fiber to my door in the next ten years as I had getting Internet access in 1990. Which is nil. You'll get your fiber long before I do!

    The article is only talking about a pilot project in an urban centre. That probably means less than 10,000 subscribers in Tokyo and Osaka with the rest of the nation being rolled out about the year 3085.

    Basically, Internet access sucks in this country--both in price and in lack of bandwidth. And fiber just isn't going to happen any time soon!

    True, NTT has one of the most advanced ISDN infrastructures in the world. Hell, I can walk up to almost any payphone--even in between two rice paddies--and "plug in".

    But ISDN is part of the problem. NTT has invested giga-yen into it and they will do their damnedest to milk it for all the revenue they can--including delaying offering new services that would make ISDN obsolete.

    You can get 128K ISDN dial-up connections to your ISP from anywhere in Japan but if you want a 24-hour connection (that avoids the 3.3 yen/min toll charges on local calls) you have to sign up for OCN Economy [ocn.ne.jp]. The name is ironic: They charge 32,000 yen (US$298 [xe.net]) per month for it. At least they throw in 8 IP addresses.

    Never mind fiber, when they roll out ADSL they are only going to be able to charge about 4500 yen, eroding their ISDN revenue base and pissing off a lot of corporate customers who signed long-term (3 year) contracts for OCN Economy. Watch: Before ADSL goes nation-wide, NTT will at least half the price of OCN Economy.

    NTT introduced another pilot in November 1999: a flat-rate ISDN service for 8000 yen per month. This one, aimed at non-corperate users, doesn't include the cost of your ISP and I'm not even sure if it has a static IP address. In May they expanded it to cover several more wards of Tokyo and also Osaka City but this service is still a pilot (30,000 subscribers) and not outside of the two urban centres. Walk into a local NTT in my city and ask about this or ADSL and they hand you a pamphlet for OCN Economy saying that it is the lowest priced service they offer.

    Similar pilots are underway with ADSL with plans to roll out nation wide in less than a year, but I've been hearing these kinds of announcements for years. I've learned not to get my hopes up.

    Looking on the bright side, even if I can't get ADSL before 2002, when NTT lowers it's prices on OCN Economy this year, I will at least be able to get it for less than I am paying now in dial-up charges: My current NTT local-call toll charges to my ISP are between 15,000 to 25,000 yen a month!

    On another front, I was supposed to get cable Internet access a year ago. I went to my local cable company the other day to get a status report. They said my area was pushed back--slated for 2002. They didn't seem to think there was any need to hurry, the high cost of upgrading their equipment being the main excuse for the delay. I talked directly to one of their technical staff and explained to them how ADSL was going to beat them to the market. They hadn't even heard of ADSL! I got the impression that they simply don't understand the concept of competition, having been granted a monopoly on CATV services for their region. Anyway, they charge about 80,000 yen for installation.

    So what about fiber? NTT is talking about offering their "Medium/High-Speed IP Service" this year, in areas where they already have FTTH (fiber to the home). So what homes already have fiber? Not many even in Tokyo. And a year ago NTT's projection on a nation-wide network of fiber feeder cables was 2010.

    I say "Dream on...!".

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