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NTT To Send Movies, Games Via Fiber-Optic Network
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 ...
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.
.mp4 report at Tom's detailing how a DVD will fit with little visible loss on a CD using mp4 compression. ooops.
Not unlike the
A stronger force than the inevitability of technology developments, is the consumer demand driving hardware manufacturers.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
You forget, my friend, that Sony is a major player in the MPAA. And they're in the RIAA, too, for that matter. Stick that in your smarmy pipe and smoke it, eh?
Let the conspiracy theories commence!
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
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...
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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.
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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!
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ADVENTURERS! - ANTIHERO FOR HIRE - CARDMASTER CONFLICT
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Okay, I hope I'm not the only one that thought that said "nipple telegraph".
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All generalizations are false.
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I like to watch.
Holland Michigan is actually sitting on a similar network, 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.
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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?
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Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
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.
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.
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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.
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.
> 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. The name is ironic: They charge 32,000 yen (US$298 ) 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...!".