Japanese Online Connectivity Ahead of EU/US 259
An anonymous reader writes "The experience of getting online in North America and Europe is years behind the internet connectivity options in Japan, the New York Times reports. While here in the US cable and DSL options are still struggling to reach rural areas, eight million Japanese consumers are now enjoying fiber optic speeds at home for comparable prices. The article explores the fiber-to-the-doorstep approach the country's telecoms are taking, with examination of both the ups and downs of such an ambitious project. 'The heavy spending on fiber networks, analysts say, is typical in Japan, where big companies disregard short-term profit and plow billions into projects in the belief that something good will necessarily follow. Matteo Bortesi, a technology consultant at Accenture in Tokyo, compared the fiber efforts to the push for the Shinkansen bullet-train network in the 1960s, when profit was secondary to the need for faster travel. "They want to be the first country to have a full national fiber network, not unlike the Shinkansen years ago, even though the return on investment is unclear."'"
Not that hard when you look at the size (Score:2, Insightful)
Of course... (Score:3, Insightful)
We might want to discuss all the various reasons as to why America has fallen so much behind. In the past, we brought up land area and population density while forgetting that some countries in northern Europe with lower density fare better. Nobody ever brought this up even if that's one big obvious difference right there.
Deconstructing the Japan Inc Hype (Score:2, Insightful)
Japan is a tiny island. The United States consists of the fairly large part of the North American continent and Europe, taken together, is not entirely tiny either. Of course it will be easier to wire Japan than it would be the USA or Europe.
People that argue that Japan is somehow doing something "unprofitable" to get a strategic gain need to wonder why Japan protects its telecommunications sector to the extent it does. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and other telecommunications concerns would love to get into Japan, and have been pushing the governments of the USA to get Japan to open its communications backplane to foreign competition, but, really, to no avail, as evidenced by the following cites:
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-3841226_ITM [ecnext.com]
http://www.clintonpresidentialcenter.org/legacy/050399-report-on-japan-deregulation.htm [clintonpre...center.org]
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE5D6143DF937A15750C0A9669C8B63 [nytimes.com]
So sure, you can buy into the hype, but the reality is, Japanese telecommunications are both anti-competitive and comparitively easy to do.
Re:Infrastructure considerations (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you smell that? Fresh bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are spouting bullshit, very fine, very fresh and very pure bullshit.
Why? The city/state of New York and other such places in the US easily have a similar population density as Tokyo. Nobody is claiming that the many remote regions in Japan are as well serviced as its major cities.
But dumb people like you immidiatly take it as an excuse, oh the US has some remote locations therefore big population centers can't have fiber. This offcourse perfectly explains sweden, again a country with far better connections then the US AND a far lower population density. They are however not dumb americans and decided that they would install fast connections were people live.
You don't have to cover the US in fiber anymore then any other country has, just the places were lots of people live. In between these major cities you can KEEP the existing fiber that is already in place. So please tell me again what is so different about japanese cities compared to american cities that the japanese have rolled out that LAST mile of fiber and the americans are still on copper?
Because again if you weren't a dumb american you would know that the US has a fiber network, this story is about the last mile.
Re:Interesting tidbits in the article (Score:5, Insightful)
As said 1000 times NOT EVEN IN CITIES (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore I keep hearing this argument for, how many years now ? In the mean time many sparsely dense country like your northern neighbors get a better bit rate in both more dense and sparsely dense area...
Re:Population density? Small land mass? (Score:1, Insightful)
We've had it for a while too. Of course, advancing rather than complaining might be why your dollar is only worth pennies nowadays.
Re:an odd comparison (Score:1, Insightful)
Could you be any more clueless? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is about fiber to the home, not for long-haul transport. Even in rural Wyoming there is fiber everywhere, except for the last part to the user. You don't have to lay humongous amounts of new fiber, the backbone infrastructure is already in use, again, even in Wyoming. You just have to make an effort to replace the last mile(s) to the home.
In Japan they are willing to do that, because there isn't an immediate lust for profit. A sort of "if you build it, profit will/may come". For that same reason it will never happen in the US. Because you --as a people-- are shallow, narrow minded pricks with a degenerate obsession for short-term money.
Regulation. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Interesting tidbits in the article (Score:4, Insightful)
But if 100Mbit class connection were cheap and you had one anyway (hey, it didn't cost much extra so why not), you might decide that you *did* care about offsite backups. If offsite is as painless as onsite, why not? It's like always-on connectivity was back in the era of dialup -- sure, no one needs it, but once you have it it changes the way you use the internet.
And I can think of plenty of things I'd like to do where higher bandwidth would be nice. Download Hi-def videos instead of renting them from the store (ignoring the difficulties with drm and what not for a minute). Better quality video on youtube. Something better than 64kbps for web radio broadcasts. Not just offsite backups, but offsite network-accessible home directories -- why can't I access my desktop the way I'm used to it on any computer I sit down at?
There's plenty of things to do with cheap fast bandwidth, and as it becomes available we'll discover what they are. It's a shame I can't buy a decent speed connection yet.
Re:Regulation. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re: Not that hard when you look at the size (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The reason: (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Population density? Small land mass? (Score:1, Insightful)
San Francisco: 6,111 people/km (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_francisco)
Tokyo: 5796 people/km (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo)
Does this say something, too?
Re:Expected Cost: 11x (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep hearing this excuse, but it really doesn't add up. I've visited Japan and spent quite a bit of time in the USA. Comparing Tokyo to NYC seems fair; they seemed to have similar population densities. Does NYC have the same level of connectivity as Tokyo? I also stayed in a small town in Japan (Takada, for anyone who's interested), and I've seen a lot of American towns of similar size; do they all have comparable connectivity? Getting the connection to the city is fairly cheap, it's the last mile that is the really expensive bit, and the cost of that is relative to population density.
The low average population density of the USA is often given as an excuse, but it ignores population distribution. If you look at a map showing the population density over the whole world, the western half of the USA, with the exception of a few dots and some very dense concentrations on the western seaboard, is almost completely empty in relative terms. If you confine yourself to the eastern half, you'll see huge areas the same density as Japan, and the rest the same or greater density than the EU.
Yes, Japan does have an advantage in terms of overall population density (although it is far more mountainous than most of the populated places of the USA), but nothing like a factor of 20 advantage for the vast majority of the population of the USA.
Re:Regulation. (Score:4, Insightful)
2) Monoploys think its too expensive to install so ignore the idea.
3) fibre Start-ups can't break into the telecommunications monopoly.
4) go to 1
Capitalism is the idea that you can control greed. It works for individuals but not for super rich companies that control a monopoly.
Re:Interesting tidbits in the article (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to ask different questions, instead of "do users really need to connect via 100 Mbps?" you have to ask questions like "If an user will download 250 MB of program updates, how long will they want to wait just staring at the screen?" The answer is obviously that they don't want to wait *at all*. You might of course argue that you can install updates in the background, but that's kind of dodging the point.
I have a 2,33 GHz dual core processor. Do I need that much computing power 24/7? Of course not. I "need" it because of the peak output. If I start a program for example, I don't want to wait that one second more -- simply because it's annoying. Or when decompressing a 5 GB archive, I will need to wait a very significant amount of time, so there really would be an use for 100's of times faster processors and drives.
Another point is that even if the real "need" is somewhere around say, 20-30 Mbps, the extra bit doesn't do any harm. There really is no reason to artificially go down to the "real" need.
Re:Interesting tidbits in the article (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Not that hard when you look at the size (Score:1, Insightful)
And so the single large US cities out there still have shittier network connectivity at the consumer level than the suburbs of Tokyo.
why don't they set up shop in the US and get busy doing the same?
Because of contracts with the bells and cable companies that give them government-backed monopolies in most areas, without which they would have to negotiate with each individual propertyowner the right to cross their property and still have to pay the city to run stuff under the roads?
Why not go pan-European?
XS4ALL seems to be doing just fine on its quest to expand out of
Re:Infrastructure considerations (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not that hard when you look at the size (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Not that hard when you look at the size (Score:3, Insightful)
Did your grandparents throw up their arms and make excuses about how big the place was? Did they whine? Did they look the other way and say it wasn't such a big deal when other countries surpassed them?
Why is it that everytime this topic comes up on Slashdot, the discussion gets filled with whining about your population density?
Suck it up! Lagging behind in technology is NOT a good thing. Get it up to snuff or you risk facing serious negative effects in the long term. This is the time you roll up your sleeves and cover that big country of yours in fiber, just like you did with roads.
You should be sitting down and figuring out why it's not getting built and how to change that. Making excuses related to the size of your country might make you feel better, but it will not help your technological infrastructure.
Mindset (Score:2, Insightful)