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Cell Phones: Japan vs. the United States
Stirland writes "Cell phones/Connectivity: Japan and the United States: Worlds Apart on Wireless. Interesting analysis of the economic and cultural reasons for why the Japanese kick Americans' butts when it comes to wireless cell phone technology and usage."
Everytime I read how behind the United States is compared to Finland, Japan, etc., it upsets me that one simple concept is rarely, if ever, mentioned..
The United States has a very, very, very large land mass compared to Japan or Finland, or any other country in Europe that has cooler cell phone technology than we do.
It's simply very, very expensive and time consuming for companies to roll out services that *might* get the public interested...
So while I would very much like to have video on my phone or simply be able to buy a Dr Pepper out of a soda machine, the sheer size of the United States makes it difficult for such widespread agreements on standards or progress in new technology...
Meanwhile, a working dad in Japan gets to watch his son grow up.
Yes, I suppose in 128x128 resolution at 1 frame per second. But in north america and europe where the working week is 60 hours a week, the father (or mother) can actually watch the child and maybe offer a helping hand. Instead of admire a pixelated version.
Perhaps this phenemonon can explain the adoption gap. If we have more time to spend with the ones we love, we don't need to purchase technological replacements for this contact.
Just a thought.
However, there are significant reasons to believe the claim is true in this case. For instance, consider electric fields. You may not be aware of this or have thought of it this way, but a microwave oven is basically just a big, unmodulated radio station broadcasting in the microwave band instead of the radio band. And what do we use microwave ovens for? Cooking things.
And microwaves, like all electromagnetic radiation, are caused by what? Electric fields. And a major source of electric fields and broadcast power is what? Cell phones. And we put cell phones where? Next to our genitals and next to our brains[1].
So, while I love my personal computer, SUV, air-conditioning and other marvels of modern life I Just Say No to cancer-causing cell phones.
[1] For me this is two separate locations, YMMV
It's simple: in Japan, Europe, Australia, New Zealand etc... you only pay to call someone, not to receive a call. I understand most Americans are reluctant to give out their cellphone numbers because you pay to receive calls as well.
This is stupid.
Also, the US has a large culture of pager use that just hasn't taken off anywhere else in the world. We have cellphones with SMS capability to do the same thing. Forget combining the two products - they're already combined.
There are five stages to owning a mobile phone: This presumes you've got one to make use of it, not to just so you can say you have one.
1: Buy the phone. Many people think this is the only thing they have to do. It's not.
2: Carry the damned thing with you everywhere. Most fall over at this point because they do things like only carry the phone to work or whatever - if it's not with you AT ALL TIMES then people won't get used to reaching you on it. This stage is tricky because you carry it everywhere even when it doesn't ring, and it won't for ages until:
3: Don't be afraid to give out your number to everyone. EVERYONE. Once you've done this you'll actually start receiving calls - it's only at this point you'll be seeing the benefit of having the phone.
4: Don't be afraid to MAKE calls on your phone. The more you use it the more you'll be contacted on your phone.
I am a leaf on the wind
And the "large country" argument doesn't hold water. Mobile telephony in Australia is a generation ahead of the US, and we're about the same land mass with one fifteenth the population. Ok, coverage ain't great in the middle, but you can make a phone call in Melbourne, and hold the same connection while you drive 4000km to Cape York.
I once stood on the ancient Greek island of Delos which was once the centre of the known universe, and received a mobile phone call from someone back home in Oz who'd just dialed my regular number. Awesome.
Some say that many Japanese have turned to wireless phones because a residential phone line costs $700 to install. While that explains the quick adoption of mobile phones for voice calls, it doesn't explain the embrace of data services.
Umm, except that in most countries people get online and access "data services" through the telephone network. If it is prohibitively expensive to access the Internet from home, due to setup and/or per-minute/per-month charges, it makes sense that people spend more time sending e-mail and accessing information from their phones rather than from home PCs. I don't know if this is the case, but I would like to have seen it addressed in the article.
I know at $700 I would not be ready to add a second phone line for the Net and I don't know how far along the broadband rollout is over there.
The biggest reason why cellphones have not taken off in the US in comparison to Europe, at least, is simply price -- or in particular the *way* they are priced.
In Germany (and, I believe, in most other European countries), cellphones are charged exactly the same way a fixed-line phone is charged. You pay a basic monthly fee, and you pay per second or 10 seconds for calls you make. There are no "airtime" fees or other gotchas. The rates are also easy to understand, more or less -- for a call within your provider's network, you pay a "local" call; calls within your country are "long-distance"; and calls outside of your country are international. Quite rational.
My provider also has the added perk that I can choose either five fixed-line numbers or one area code to get discounted calls. So if I choose Berlin's area code -- 030 -- I can call anyone in Berlin for a much lower rate.
In comparison, my family in the States has a blizzard of confusing fee schedules, with plenty of "gotchas" built-in.
Another problem is the lack of standards across the States. Europe has the GSM standard, and your phone will work across nearly all of Europe. The USA has no such common standard, and even if you're smart enough to get a dual-band or tri-band cellphone, you get hammered on the roaming charges in the States.
I'm actually not that much of a fan of cellphones-as-portals, though -- WAP seems such an abortion of an idea and so far navigating the Web with a keypad is just a non-starter (and, like the article says, Americans tend to drive and not take public transport, so they have less time to fiddle with the things). But it is often a nice option to have. I use it to check what movies are playing (and to reserve tix), check train times (OK, that's not too useful in the States ;-P ) and sometimes to check the news, but that's about it -- I would never buy anything with it, because the technology is so far rather insecure.
i-Mode was also recently introduced in Germany by my provider (they licensed the technology from NTT-DoCoMo), so Europe is close to Japan's level now, though it remains to be seen if i-Mode and other 2.5G technologies take off in Europe (let alone 3G).
GPRS and HSCSD are also well-established, so I can go online at 56K digital with my Nokia and Powerbook via infrared and OS X (haven't gotten it to work with Linux, tho). GPRS is *very* expensive, though -- 2.5 Eurocents per 1K of data -- but HSCSD is fairly reasonable (why the difference, I don't know -- both give you the same speed AFAIK).
Cheers,
Ethelred
Everyone wants to be Ethelred. Even I want to be Ethelred.
They don't lay off their staff every six months.
Having someone around who actually knows how to build something is important to the empire-building, plant-watering donut list and their bonuses.
Japan in particular probably has a much better developed sense of loyalty and business ethics as well. Of course, the suits will disagree, but when was the last $4 billion "accounting error" in Japan?
*sigh*
Why do seemingly well-intentioned and intelligent people assume that distinct and different cultures should enjoy a technological homogoneity?
Is it that difficult to understand that not everything that works for Americans works for Japanese or Europeans? There are many factors that determine which technologies thrive in different countries. This article both acknowledges these difrerences and at the same time dismisses them. Why? Probably because a rationale article doesn't pay the bills for a freelance writer compared to a doom and gloom article.
The Japanese like their cellphones? Good for them. I like my broadband connection.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Two years ago when I was in Tokyo, we were giving a demo with our Japanese counterparts to a financial instutution there.
The demos were given at 120k bps over a cell phone that flipped open and plugged into a pcmcia slot in our laptop.
That freakin' rocked. We (USA) didn't have anything even close.
July 2001 est. population density (people per sq/km of land):
Finland: 16.9
Sweden: 21.6
Japan: 415.0
US: 30.4
Of course, as you say, the density of major urban areas is in many ways more important than overall density. But it's still worth noting the difference in Japan -- I'd count a 13.7x difference as significant enough to have an effect.
This article doesn't mention how much they pay all together, and what sorts of services their plans offer. All the plans here have some downfall: not enough daytime minutes, nasty long distance charges, exorbitant roaming, etc. Pick one or two of those and you have basically every plan. Anyone know?
sig.
the point he was making was that it would be bad for society, not him. It wouldn't matter if he used his phone or not, its the rest of america that is.
1. 99.99 percent of the time, it can wait.
Yeah, see the thing is, I don't want to be reached all the time. Right now, there is no reason any one would need to contact me urgently. Whatever it is, it can wait. If it's that much of an emergency that you have to get in touch with me, maybe you should call 911 first.
Thats why my cell phone sits in a drawer, and is only pulled out and activated when I move someplace where I can't get a land line. (I'm a college student, the moving every 9/3 months thing is getting old fast...)
I understand that there are certain careers where you do need to be in touch all the time, but if I'm not in one, the cell phone stays in the drawer.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
If you want to fault the land line systems of Europe as helping the cellphone markets, you'd better try the marketing. The US has that rather nice system of unmetered local calling and per-minute usually-flat-rate long distance. Most phone companies in Europe, with the exception of that of Kingston Upon Hull, Great Britain (!), charge per-minute rates for every phone call (800 numbers to the receiver, obviously, and emergency and maintenance calls are obviously free.), and rates vary depending on distance, time of day and day of week. This means the concept of paying per minute for phone calls wasn't an issue when mobile phone networks started to have enough capacity to be popular.
But in all, a lot of the credit for the success of mobile networks in Europe has to go to GSM. GSM was designed to have much of the functionality of ISDN networks (AMPS, which sadly IS-136 [so called D-AMPS or TDMA and derivatives] and cdmaOne have done much to try to emulate, tried to look as much like POTS as possible.), the phones were cheap and interchangable, users could have multiple phones on a single subscriber line (via the SIM card - if you have any difficulty understanding why, get a PDA phone), and the standardisation on a single standard and cost savings as a result, have done much to make the phone a genuine one-size-fits-all standard.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
1) U.S. is huge in terms of area. Nationwide digital, I mean real nationwide, can't be rolled out because of the cost. This is another reason why Europeans have one standard being GSM. GSM was initially rejected by U.S. operators because the cell size is so small. CDMA was promised to solve all of the problems that GSM didn't. CDMA, widely adopted in the U.S., can have larger cell sizes because it is not based on time division. If you make a GSM cell too large, it takes too long for the signal to travel thus messing up the frame of the next time slot. With CDMA, there is a tradeoff of cell size versus capacity versus quality (9.6kps or 14.4kbs). Cell sizes can be made much larger however the noise floor is raised thus reducing the capacity of that cell.
Also smaller cell sizes, as present in Japan, makes phones smaller because they don't need to output as much power thus requiring a smaller battery.
However looking back, it sure would be nice if we had a single unified digital standard like the Europeans, but does that really inhibit people here?? If I have a TDMA phone, that doesn't stop me from calling my buddy who has a GSM phone?
2) We already have an efficient land-based voice&data infrastructure that is cheap and omnipresent. Everybody, I mean everybody including your grandparents, already has land-based voice service. This isn't the case in other countries where land-based service is costly or unavailable.
3) We have the space, and the money, for computers in our households. Why surf the internet on a 2" screen when you have that Gateway sitting in your living room at home?
4) A multitude of other socio-economic/cultural reasons that are on the tip of my tongue but I don't feel like delving into. For example, I did away with my cellphone because I would rather spend my money on DSL at home. Even if my cellphone had the nifty Japanese features, I still would choose my PC at home with DSL. Some may not agree with me, but I believe that many do. If I had a little more money to spend, a cellphone with basic voice service would suffice.
Well a cell phone is one way to write e-mails or messages, but I would rather write e-mails on my computer with a full sized keyboard. Cell phones will do in a jiffy, but writing messages on them is much less efficient. I don't want to be pecking away on buttons smaller than my fingernails. I'll just use those keys on the cell *phone* to call them ;)
JOhn
Campaign for Liberty
Most of the European phone systems worked okay, they were just expensive. Simple explanation - the state owned companies had a monopoly.
How did GSM beat the monopoly? Simple, the rule was that any phone line crossing a public street violated the monopoly. Cell towers circumvented this problem.
Price wars between mobile carriers got prices to an acceptable level.
If you got a $100 bill, put your hands up...
I really cannot understand why these articles keep popping up saying, "Why are cell phones so popular in Japan and Europe when they are not in the US?"
The reason I am so sick of this is that the reasons are basically obvious to anybody that does not have a business degree. There are two main categories for this problem: Greed and marketing stupidity. And these problems are also pervasive in the US broadband market.
The first problem, greed, should be obvious to any customer or individual who has even inquired about cellphones at any store. Every company has their own proprietary cell phones and will not allow customers to use their service without buying a new phone. This was covered in this slashdot article.
This practice essentially creates a monopoly where the customer must deal with a large expense to switch service providers. Companies might think this is good for business because it protects their customer base, but it, in fact, harms their business because people do not like to commit like that. In this case, the cellphone becomes disposable, and who is going to shell out 300+ bucks for a disposable phone?
The other aspect to this greed was pointed out by Linus himself in his book Just for Fun . He said the fact that all of the service providers had proprietary systems instead of agreeing on a standard, like GSM, caused the market to be stagnant. I agree with this point. In addition to the fact that it would alleviate the problem stated above, it would also have avoided a lot of the other problems encountered by the cell phone industry. The biggest of these problems was the problem of building cell towers. Without a common standard, the companies all had to build their own system of cell towers, so the service varied greatly from place to place. Service was bad, so customers were annoyed.
In a common system where companies would be using compatable equipment, they could just pay eachother for bandwidth usage and compete on price and service. However, they wanted to spend all that extra money to attempt to create monopolies. I really do not see the point of having a monopoly over a small number of customers, though.
The other aspect was stupid marketing. This article talks about what American consumers are doing in their cars. It says that they might want a wireless app to give them a traffic report. This is typical of the marketing decision that was made by some brainiac way back in the early days. Some genius thought that the people who would use cellphones the most would be businessmen. The cellphone industry should find and castrate this guy. He has not only made cellphones bad for business but for the consumer as well.
Why was this guy stupid? Because businessmen know how much work they do for their dollar. They are not going to spend one more second on the phone than is necessary. They also do not care about aesthetics (unless they are in sales, but even then, most business men have notoriously bad taste, and it is often quite entertaining to watch yuppies feign artistic appreciation). Therefore, businessmen are not going to use their cellphones excessively, and neither are they going to pay top dollar for the prettiest phone on the market.
Who is going use their phones a lot and pay for the most expensive ones, then? The article has a clue. It says:
The author (obviously someone who has been in the business world too long) talks about "a phenomenon driven by teenage girls." This is not phenomenon. Think back to when you were a teenager and dating. How many times did you get into a serious fight with a sibling over phone usage? How many times did you get into a fight with your parents restrictions on the phone? How many times did you stay up most or all of the night whispering into the phone so that your parents would not hear?Teenagers are the key to cellphone market. They always have been. Teenagers will talk until the battery dies. Teenages will carry an extra battery. Teenagers will buy extra accessories for their phones. Teenagers will use their phones as status symbols to their friends.
But who pays for these cell phones? Well, the parents, of course. The parents will buy cellphones for their teenagers because they want their kid to be safe. They will want to check up on the kid now and then.
Now, we have a responsible group (the parents: those businessmen whose money everyone wanted) funding the excesses of an irresposible group (the teenagers who have a hormonal imperative to generate big bills). A phenomenon? I think not.
As obvious as this may sound, it did not occur to the author of the article or the businessmen she interviewed. Cell phones have always been ugly in the US. I will not buy Motorola products because they always released ugly products to the US market (although their cellphones are quite pretty in Asia). I think this attitude that Americans have no aesthetic taste is quite insulting.
In any case, I am sick of this whining about the consequences of stupid business decisions. It sounds like GM in the late 70's blaming Japan because American consumers did not want the big cars that GM could make greater profits on. Did any of these people read Adam Smith? The market cannot be forced to accept a product (unless of course you are Microsoft).
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