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The Internet Technology

Japan: VoIP for the Masses With 050 120

Posted by timothy from the open-up-555-so-we-can-call-movies dept.
securitas writes "Red Herring has a brief article about wide-scale VoIP deployment in Japan with the introduction of the new 050 area code. The new area code 'allows plain old telephone service (POTS) to seamlessly transition to voice-over-IP (VoIP).' Japan is now the largest country to deploy VoIP. Six companies have bought 8.5 million VoIP phone numbers, with 68% (5.78 million) of the new numbers owned by Softbank BB Phone. At $.010 for a three-minute call, the cost is three to eight times less expensive than regular wireline service."
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Japan: VoIP for the Masses With 050 More

Japan: VoIP for the Masses With 050

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  • Hopefully (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SargeZT ( 609463 ) * <pshanahan@mn.rr.com> on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @03:31PM (#7847526) Homepage
    Hopefully this means that Japan will put more force onto the US government to switch to VoIP. The system is so much more efficient than plain analog lines. Japan does tend to set trends for the US.

    If nothing else, DDR Shows us that much.

    • Re:Hopefully (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DarthBart ( 640519 )
      Boy, that's going to irritate the FBI/CIA/other TLA agencies. Its difficult to tap a VOIP call...and its much easier to encrypt.
      • There are CALEA-compliant products available for VOIP, and no end-to-end VOIP encryption standards exist.

        Encryption is more problematic if you consider the interface to POTS -- even if you had appropriate/sufficient hardware at the central office to handle the VOIP encryption, the audio would still be available in "cleartext" on the POTS side.

    • It could be. The Softbank venture is in partnership with Yahoo Japan Softbank holds >40% of Yahoo Japan and is deploying VOIP through Yahoo broadband (100% owned by Softbank) [investors.com]

      If a company such as Yahoo (and NTT in competition soon?) can make a go of it in Japan they should hopefully be able to implement a similar business model in other countries too.
    • Where do services like Vonage stand in the US today? they seem to have a sizable user base, they have the links from POTS to VoIP and the service seems to work already.

      If you've never heard of them there is a link on the humor page below. (it's a friends referal link thingy)

    • AT&T, as well as some of the other major long distance carriers, have already partially converted to VoIP, and have plans to completely convert in the next few years.

      In the next 5 years or so, expect that circuit oriented POTS will only exist from the customer premises to local exchange office. VoIP between exchange offices is allowing the carriers to carry more traffic on the same copper or fiber trunks than the current multiplexed circuit systems.

    • Re:Hopefully (Score:2, Insightful)

      by tetranz ( 446973 )
      Hopefully this means that Japan will put more force onto the US government to switch

      Yeah, like when one or two countries changed to the metric system. The US shows no fear of being left in the dark ages.
  • is STILL too much money for a phone call!

    Question: When the Enterprise made a call down to Andalusian 3, who paid for the call?
    Answer: NOBODY!
    • At $.010 for a three-minute call

      THREE minute call. so it's $0.333333333333333333333333333333334 cents per minute
      • THREE minute call. so it's $0.333333333333333333333333333333334 cents per minute

        I think you mean $0.0033333333333 cents per minute. :)
        • Well, $0.003333_ is 1/3 of a cent.
          I think we're talking about $0.03333_ which is 3 and 1/3 cents.

          There is a typo in the story summary, it should be $0.10 per 3 minutes. Check the article.
          If we're talking $.010 per 3 minutes, that's 1 cent per 3 minutes, which would be much more then 3x - 8x less than the current going rates.

    • Re:$.010 per Minute (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DarthBart ( 640519 ) on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @03:38PM (#7847594)
      Nobody paid for the call directly. But someone had to be paid to mine the dilithium that powered the warp core that drove the the communications array. And someone else had to be paid to build the communications array. Its called trickle down economics. Do you think that all the LD companies are suddenly finding it in the goodness of their heart to offer flat rate LD? Not bloody likely. One company did it to get a competitive edge, the rest had to do it or risk losing business. Even at flat rate, they're still making a killing at $24.95 a month...it costs them a fraction of a fraction of a cent to terminate an LD minute.
      • Cost per call. Analysts will take in account average call usage, amount of tech support to run the system, all the extra factors, and come up with an cost for each telco. (Couldnt google up an example, but there are many examples out there) VoIP is going to take the long haul costs out, since most telco's own thier own fibre, lots of savings. But its already down to layoffs and merger time for telcos, so anything that can lower costs, the better.
        • Wanna lower costs? Fire the CEO, CIO, CFO, CTO, COOB, SEVP, EVP. There. You've just saved yourself 7+ million dollars a year. I'm a VoIP consultant for a small LD company and we're making a fortune because someone figured out that "Hey, we don't need 100+ middle managers to run things. Just a couple of sales guys and switch monkeys".
      • ...someone had to be paid to mine the dilithium that powered the warp core that drove the the communications array. And someone else had to be paid to build the communications array...

        Don't forget that the Federation eliminated money some time around the 23rd century.
        • Then what's the whole deal with gold pressed latinum? The Ferengi get some major ear wood over it. Oh, and what happens if you're getting your dilithium from a non-Federation planet? Something of value has to be exchanged. Dear god, someone shoot me. I'm discussing Star Trek economics on Slashdot.
          • From experience observing (but never taking part) I beleive they barter, if the Ferengi want something they usually give something up in exchange.

            Though I never understood the bar in DS9, the Ferengi needs payment but the Federation do not have currency. Perhaps it is more akin to an external barter/currency (gold-pressed latinum based?) but nothing needed inside the Federation. I am not sure. Guidance from a Trekker/Treckie needed.
            • The explaination I got was that for some reason Latinum is one of the few materials that the replicators can't duplicate, but just about everything else can be transformed from energy into matter. So, Latinum is inherently scarce and thus valuable to Ferengis because of scarcity alone (but not utility?).

              It's an evolutionary psych thing to be able to claim ownership of something that no one else has. Your genes are then more attractive to the opposite sex.

              --

    • Oops. Typo.

      That should be 10 cents for three minutes, not 1 cent.
  • voip and pots interoperability is a very good thing. hopefully this will pressure other countries into doing the same.
    • voip and plain old telephone service is interoperable and has been for some time. Vonage [vonage.com] and similar services cost far less than competing POTS plans and bridge the gap between the two. Its just that nobody knows about them because the big phone companies haven't taken the bait yet. (AT&T sort of has, but no service yet)

      Voip is nifty- its supercheap, loads of extra features for free, and you can plug in to any DHCP internet socket in the world with usually no configuration.

  • 1 cent? (Score:5, Funny)

    by bhny ( 97647 ) <bhNO@SPAMusa.net> on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @03:32PM (#7847541) Homepage
    is $.010 some 3133+ way of writing 1 cent?

  • $0.010 might be misleading (Score:4, Funny)

    by Shut the fuck up! ( 572058 ) on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @03:33PM (#7847545)
    It could be $0.0109!
    • Its quite ironical that the country that was in the dark ages between 95 and 2000 is now leading the way in broadband and related applications while others try to catch up slowly.

      Most of the credit should go to softbank bb. It does have a lot of debt from its ventures but hopefully its debt will reduce in the next 2-3 years.
    • but then you'd have to round up to $0.011
  • It's very good to see some forward movement in the development of 'real world' VoIP solutions. Let's hope 2004 will be the year when the rest of the world can agree on a set of standards that will allow this technology to bring the global benefits it has always had the promise to fulfill. One of the big downsides to the dotcom bust, was that VoIP was to be the next big area of convergence, and suddenly everyone pulled there investment from it, into bolstering their weakening core markets. With financial sta
  • BT [btbroadbandvoice.com] just introduced a mainstream VoIP service on an 050 code as well.
    • Some prefixes (0800 and 0900 spring to mind - substitute 1 for the leading 0 in North America) have become international standards, perhaps 050 is too.
  • .10 cents is around the American average per POTS call, VoIP is going to lower the long haul and add extra services, great for America. Wonder why Japan has such high last mile cost, other than the wire mess and bad planning for expansion for copper.
    • Ten cents, or 0.10 cents? You guys are getting me confused.
    • Japan has a high last mile cost largely because NTT is a greedy former government department monopoly, much the same as BT and other telecom companies around the world that are not as heavily regulated as the US baby bells.
  • Masayoshi Son (Softbank CEO) was the golden child of Japan's brief Internet boom, and was very quickly derided afterwards by the Japanese technology press.

    Of Korean extraction (?) - a gaijin - and with a technical background, it's good too see someone like him get the last laugh over the Japanese oligopolies like NTT and KDDI.
    • Very true about Masayoshi Son who I met at an International Compauter Association meeting years ago.

      Another was my good friend Roger Boisvert [boisvert.jp] who started the first public ISP in Japan. A caustic Canadian with limited Japanese skills he was still able to get stuff done.

      Murdered in LA by some punk when he asked for directions.
  • but it will make the biggest difference in Europe, where the state controlled telecom monopolies have made voice service so expensive that an entire generation is coming up knowing only cell phones. VoIP may bring "wired" phones back in Europe.
  • I realize that, outside of North America, most places charge even for local (short-distance) calls. However, I would think that Japan, with it's (relatively small) land area and its highly-developed phone network, phone calls there would be essentially free, or at least free for intra-city calling. I always here that Japan has extremely expensive phone service. Any reason?
    • Even in NA, you can get phone service where every call costs you money, be it in the next state or next door. It just depends on how much you want to pay for a monthly fee. $10/mo and every call costs you 5 cents a minute, $20/mo and you can call within a certain area for free & everything else is 2.5 cents a minute, or $30/mo and all your intra-LATA calls are free and then you pay your LD company $24.95/mo for flat rate LD. Nothing is free.

    • Minor nit. Japan does not really have that small of a land area. If you were to move Japan over to Europe, it would be the second or third largest country there. (I believe France is the only purely European country that would be larger.)

      Japan's problem is on the maps it's right up against Russia and China on one side--the largest and fourth largest countries--and the North Pacific on the other--a fairly empty part of the largest ocean. And, if you look across the Pacific, you've got Canada and the US--sec

    • I'm not sure why the actual phone calls are so expensive, but I do know that you have to buy a phone number there. I think some European countries are similar. Kind of a strange situation, but you pay ~$500? (can't remember, it was at least a couple hundred) for a phone number. Then, when you leave or move or whatever, you sell it. Of course, you still have to pay for phone service on top of that.

      A lot of things are priced differently in Japan compared to America.
    • In one word: "Welcome to the NTT monopoly."
      (OK, so I can't count to one.)
  • At $.010 for a three-minute call, the cost is three to eight times less expensive than regular wireline service.
    What's remarkable about this is it goes over the same exact equipment. YOu can't tell me that the telcos can't compete with this.

  • Why is this the be all end all? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gregarican ( 694358 ) on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @04:01PM (#7847803) Homepage
    Personally I don't relish a global shift to VoIP technology. Prices can be more attractive and all but the quality of service and reliability still pales in comparison to traditional telco.

    I was in an IT position in a national wireless call center environment back in the mid-90's when VoIP was just starting to ramp up. Things have improved since then I will grant you but compared to traditional telco voice service it still is way behind.

    Look at all of the things that can (and do) affect Internet data. DDOS attacks, primary global DNS server exploits, BGP/RIP route poisoning, etc. Awhile back Cisco had to distribute a patch affecting practically every IOS version due to some exploit. Plenty of network engineers were patching away at the very infrastructure of the Internet.

    The POTS concept might seem old and passe but it's reliability can't be argued.

    • Prices can be more attractive and all but the quality of service and reliability still pales in comparison to traditional telco.

      I think this is similar to the reason lots of people are switching to OpenOffice. It's good enough for most people and the price is right. If VoIP is cheaper, but less reliable, first poor people will switch to it (or people who want to save money), then as quality improves more and more people will switch. Eventually it will be world domination.
    • People use cellular networks which drop calls from time to time. And I still get a couple of 'The network is busy. Please try your call later.' messages on my POTS.

      VoIP is good enough for many people.

      Wait until wide area 802.11 networks start popping up and VoIP is offered on multi mode cell phones.
    • The POTS concept might seem old and passe but it's reliability can't be argued.

      Very true - however its not the technology that I am excited about - its getting less reliant on the telco* and the falling prices.

      * Funny thing is we still need the telco for IP connectivity ;-) Wonder if they saw that coming with the Internet ... LOL
    • The POTS concept might seem old and passe but it's reliability can't be argued.

      You pretty much can't get POTS reliably anymore--an analog connection all the way through. And when you could, it had all sorts of problems, in terms of quality, security, and reliability.

      Prices can be more attractive and all but the quality of service and reliability still pales in comparison to traditional telco.

      Well, and if you are willing to pay a premium for having dedicated analog lines running all over the globe, yo
  • Why put VoIP in its own "area code"? In the US, companies like Vonage allow VoIP to be registered with a regular telephone number. In many markets it is possible to reassign your existing POTS number to a Vonage VoIP service.
    • I was going to ask this same question, but comments.pl died on me.

      The VOIP providers will need IP to POTS to IP conversion equipment. And to prevent callers from the POTS side of things needing to make long-distance calls into a new area code, that equipment needs to be colocated in the various city/area code regions, right? So why not use the same area code, but assign an exchange just for the VOIP users?

      Chip H.

  • Teamspeak (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by Apreche ( 239272 ) on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @04:07PM (#7847846) Homepage Journal
    My puzzle pirates crew has recently discovered teamspeak.

    http://www.teamspeak.org

    Open source, cross-platform voice chat for games. I set us up a server on my gentoo box. It was incredibly easy and awesome. Web administration interface is really slick. I highly reccomend it. If you have broadband it makes for good free international phone calls.

  • Another poorly written/confusing Slashdot article (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Jim Buzbee ( 517 ) on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @04:12PM (#7847892) Homepage
    Regarding the cost, instead of $0.01, the article states :

    a three-minute call on VoIP costs between 10.5 and 10.9 yen (about $0.10)
    Of course they could have come right out and said 10 Cents.

  • Whats the big deal? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by azuretek ( 708981 )
    I've been using vonage.com for quite a while now and it's just as good as my old phone but cheaper! I get all the extras for a fraction of the cost.

    Whenever there is a story about VoIP I allways hear people saying "it's not good enough to be mainstreem yet" but I've been using it for a long time and it seems pretty damn good to me. I think the people that say it isn't good should give it a try before they shrug it off as a sub par system.

    If you want to see how well it sounds just give me a call at 480-282
    • I'm not a naive user

      Not a naive user? I think you'd have to be pretty naive to slashdot your own phone ;) Thankfully goatse.cx loses a lot of impact when someone is describing it over the phone...

      • Don't worry. He's probably not that stupid.

        It's likely the number for some kinky sex chat line.

        So a description of goatse.cx wouldn't be completely out of line, right?

  • Several reasons for Japan's fast broadband growth are as follows:

    As has been pointed out, broadband modems are being passed out on the street by yahoo bb, who's service is cheaper than the phone companies' service. They are doing this at a great loss to try to build volume. They also include VOIP functionality, with calls to the US being charged at 5 yen (about 4 cents) a minute.

    Unfortunately Yahoo's availability is limited outside major cities. I live in a suburb of a prefectural capital and cannot ge
  • is because we dont even have 56k in some areas still.
    not to mention we are barely venturing into dsl, cable and wifi.

    this country is more economical than technological.
    so it's who ever demands it here.

    our govt is interested in two things: Money and killing people, and pushing its influence everywhere.
  • Even more interesting is that the deal includes free voice (and fax/data - if you're perverse enough) calls to all UK landlines. The hidden catch is that it's 5p/min at all to call your VoIP number, which is more than a regular long-distance call (1p/min, with the right carrier), a similar trick to the mobile companies. Calls between VoIP phones are free though.

    Full details are at BT's Broadband Voice Website [btbroadbandvoice.com]

  • This is like the fourth story of some technology that japan has adopted widescale before us. In every case I think its due to the population density and not their innovation. If all of the u.s. lived within the borders of Rhode Island I am sure we would all have broadband and VOIP. I realize that u.s. companies prevent lots of technology but I think its location location location that is the real driving force. Try rolling out broadband in South Dakota where the states are huge and the populations aren'
    • I actually I was stationed in South Dakota (Rapid City) You had 3-4 flavors of high speed to pick from there, and that was four years ago. I now am in Southern California and you are amongst the chosen ones if you can get anything above 28.8K.

      What happened is the power company saw a ripe plumb to be picked since both the cable company and the phone company in that area were dragging their feet, and the power co was looking for something to expand into since growth is fairly slow in those areas. So they

  • I think we (us, US) are almost there. When I was signing up for AT&T's $29.95 all you can eat long distance service, the CSA asked me if I had a high speed connection to the internet (don't I wish). AT&T's supposed to be offering a VOIP (or is it VoIP?) phone service this spring

  • The customer should own the number (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Codeine ( 18332 ) on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @05:42PM (#7848699) Homepage Journal
    Letting the operator own the address is repeating the existing mistake with numbering plans.

  • so we in the US can expect to see (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Archfeld ( 6757 ) * <treboreel@live.com> on Wednesday December 31, 2003 @07:57PM (#7849708) Journal
    increased costs to cover the 'equipment' for this upgrade, then the companies will rake in the profit from the new system without EVER even thinking about passing on the saving unless it becomes a price war. Just like the US networks took advantage of HDTV's expanded signal, to cram 3 times as much low definition stuff into the same bandwidth, triple their commercials, deduct the costs of upgrades, AND increase the cost to users under the guise of a better service which is actually pixelated and inmany cases worse than the analog we had before :(
    WTG King George 'FreeMarket' Kickback Bush
  • I live in Japan and have Yahoo!BB and their bundled phone service, BBPhone. The cost to call within Japan is 7.5 yen for 3 minutes. The cost to call the USA is 2.5 yen for 1 minute. The current exchange rate is about 108 yen/dollar, so these calls are incredibly cheap (about 2 cents/minute). However, the cost to other countries varies (usually much higher; it costs me about 25 yen/minute to call my friends in the UK). Anyway, this is much cheaper than what the new VoIP services will be charging, at least a

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