Slashdot Mirror
Want 12Mbits/sec for $21? Move to Japan.
gbjbaanb writes "Softbank, in Japan, has built a gigabit ethernet network to replace DSL over ATM, which costs peanuts to maintain and run. For $21 a month, Japanese users get 12Mb/sec, free VoIP (without quality loss) calls to users on the same network, (3c/min to New York), and DVD-quality movies. The company needs users to stay with the service for 15 months to break even, given that it is giving modems away for free."
This is easier in Japan than in America, for two reasons. Firstly, Japan is very densely populated, compared to most parts of America, at least. Secondly, they are a very wired (well, wireless too) culture. From what I've heard, Japan's last generation was their wired generation, and this one is their wireless generation...
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Here in Sweden, you can get 26 megabits/second, for $45/month. ^_^
as far as phone lines go....it is due to government subsidising.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Thats a misleading phrase, right there.
As is obvious from reading the article, they're not trying to make up thier losses with volume, but with ~duration~. It's a very simple, and common, business setup. I give you the equipment and service now, you pay me back slowly.
The risk is lack of a contract. When I go buy a big screen TV, or a house, or a Car, they have a contract saying that I will keep paying them, or that take my car away. With this, there is no such thing. However, I tend to think that the combination of lower costs and higher speeds should be almost as good.
Of course, if thats a normal price for Broadband in Japan, the man is crazy.
I think the telcoms in other nations are usually less privatized than in the USA. That $21 a month is subsidized by the government.
Better hope you can fit into a wiring closet, if you think cheap bandwidth is a good reason to move to Japan. Even the smallest of basic one-person apartments, in the areas where this kind of bandwidth is available, cost upwards of $800/month. Not to mention the six month deposit.
Basically, everything but bandwidth is expensive.
In contrast I get a large kitchen, living room, and two bedrooms in a quiet neighborhood for $440/month. I have more space than I can use, fairly reliable 2mbps cable modem for $40 a month, room to park my car and money to put in my savings account. I'm not even home to use my bandwidth for ten hours of the day, and cable modem is more than fast enough. Ain't America great?
...
Dysan2k said:
Existing infrastruction is a definate. They wanna make more money on existing pipes, etc
Synic's response:
Note that the vast majority of fiber optics that were laid during the dot com period are all what's called "dark" fiber-- that is, they are not currently in use. The problem is that most people are still not on broadband, because it isn't cheap enough, and so the fiber optic networks that were laid down before the dot com bust are just sitting there dormant in the ground. A lot of the companies that funded the insanely rapid expansion of fiber optic networks went out of business (including larger ones such as MCI Worldcom). Some are struggling to get by (such as Qwest) by trying to market and sell their networks in new ways (Video-on-Demand is only one that comes to mind). Additionally, companies that were solely based on enhancing fiber optic technologies like amplifiers have all gone out of business or been gobbled up by larger fish (Cisco) and their products have not really come to market in a big way since there's already an overabundance of fiber in the ground.
We've got this hooked up in the house I live in just outside of Tokyo. We split it among all the members of the house.
It's actually pretty sweet; the modem itself came with a little PCMCIA-like slot card as a part of a bonus offer, which gives us a pretty strong wireless LAN with no extra hardware (I'm two floors away from the modem, and it's a concrete earthquake-proof house); you just slide in the card and set up WEP or whatever. We also got this free calendar/calculator thingy which has a cool sliding mechanism. Hey, it was that or a coffee mug (or something else, I forget what). Anyhow, we also got 2 months (or was it 3?) free just for joining on top of all that.
I can confirm what the article says about the teens in white jackets pimping the stuff outside of every station, too. They're everywhere.
If anyone has any questions on the service, fire away. Despite the 24-hour porn dog in the next room over (he has somewhere near a 100 gig collection), the connection is still pretty speedy.
Sorry for replying to my own comment, but I forgot one REALLY cool feature:
If you plug a phone into the modem itself, then you get IP-phoning without any setup. Calls to Canada for like 2 cents a minute or something, plus the quality hardly changes from a regular international call (actually, it's far superior to many regular calling solutions). It costs more to make a phone call from an hour's drive away in Canada than it does to call half way around the world with this thing, and it just plugs right in, which I find pretty incredible.
People want to know why we can't do this in the US. Lots of finger pointing at telco greed (somewhat true) but there is more than just that, which is blocking such a revolution.
There is a huge difference between the highly connected and not areas in the US, due to the way technology has developed. Lots of fiber was put in the ground over the past ten years, fed by the expansion of telecom and datacom industries. Once the right-of-way has been purchased, the building permits acquired, the trenches dug and conduit layed, is is just a small bit more expensive to put in a lot of fiber than it is a little. So it wasn't uncommon to see 24 fibers where one would carry the traffic. This also provides some redundancy in case of failure.
You can get a lot of miles with small signal loss on fiber, but every time you splice it, there is a cost in both signal in addition to the economic. So the idea is to lay fiber to carry a lot of traffic to point B from point A, not stopping along the way.
The metallic plant (copper) is old and available and easier to splice, but has horrible performance. But this is fine if you are only going a couple of miles...most of the time. many times it can't even get that far (I am cursed with a crappy T1). Too expensive to run fiber out for everyone, splicing along the way.
So there was already all this capacity between places like New York and Boston and Washington DC, but a paucity to places like Burlington Vermont. Then there was all that 'dark fiber' that was kept in reserve, no signal going through it. But what exacerbated the situation was the development of DWDM technology, which made it possible to run much more data through each of these fibers by utilizing signals in bands that are closer together. But this equipment is expensive.
The end result is that bandwidth rich areas get richer, and the poor aren't helped at all. For an example of how bad this is, some years back the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority sold rights to run fiber down the 'pike, which stretches across the state east and west. This was very profitable in the densly populated eastern half of the state, dominated by Boston and the Rt.128 technology hub. But out in the western the hinterlands, that is across the Connecticut river and deep into area code 413, it wsn't seen as profitable. So the fiber did not run past Westfield, leaving the rest of the state left out and still with pokey, expensive, 1960s age technology. There was a great cry that again the rural population was being screwed, and a consortium was formed, called Berkshire Connect (http://www.bconnect.org) to take over the fiber rights and get western mass lit up. Unfortunately they teamed up with Global Crossing and they had many bankruptcy problems which slowed the project. But it is up and running, they've got 50 members they say, but I have no idea what the actual cost of connectivity is. I am sure it is much more expensive than what we pay in Boston.
I am not sure what can change this situation. Yes, government grants step in and throw some money around, but it will take a real lot to change the basic underlying economics. My guess is that the precipitous drop in the cost of equipment fiber, and real estate rights with the telecom market crash may bring prices into the affordable range, and maybe some local people are hired by the government as part of a public works project to put it all into the ground.
Then, there's microwave. But its reliability is an order of magnitude less than that of fiber.
I can't get the thoroughput/ping at the moment, since I'm on wireless with only 2Mbps making it all the way upstairs (when I do a speed check, I get every single byte that I should be getting of those 2Mbps). I remember that when we did check it we got a very significant percent of the advertised 12Mbps. As far as the latency on the voice IP goes, it's at very close to zero. No real difference from usual phone conversations.
I also haven't run into any problems running any services, aside from working around the firewall, but that has nothing to do with Yahoo or Softbank. I've done FTP servers, the dude next room over hammers P2P, and ICQ/IRC/whatever works well too. I'm not really doing a whole lot with the connection, however, since most of my time is taken up with studying. Internet is mostly wasting time on Slashdot and checking my mail.
Naturally as an adicted Slashdot reader i will find a place to live by submiting an "Ask Slashdot " Story and browsing at score 5.
For best results submit it here.
This is left as an exercise for the reader.
You and those who modded you up didn't read the article. The guy's fighting against NTT (The "TT" in "NTT" and "AT&T" stand for the same thing), and Japan Telecom, his competitors even asked the government to hike the fiber rental fees to make his life harder. What about telcos in the USA, their life seems easier with friends in Washington.
Is this an example of American whinging, or what..?
Ancient people like Hebrews and Egyptians actually omitted vowels in writing, which makes it next to impossible for archaeologists to find out the actual pronunciations of words. In fact, all the names of Egyptiaon pharaos are creations of Egyptologists, with vowels added for the sake of their convenience. I am pretty sure saving expensive materials like sheep leather and papyrus is an important factor to this convention.
No, I don't get that. Have a look at Sweden, our dear friend Bredbandsbolaget (ISP) offers consumers 10Mbit for $30 and has done so for years. It was actually cheaper a couple of years ago, only $20. I don't have that ISP, but I got an offer from mine that this fall we can get 26Mbit for $35 a month. And Sweden is not a overcrowded country. There has to be something else. Better competition? Could be. Our government agency that handles these issues has been really, really consumer-friendly (as they are supposed to be), and forced companies with monopoly to let other companies get access to their network and sometimes even just lower their prices! I love them! :)
Well, you also have to take into account seafood.. Japan is an island nation and in general has more seafood in their diet. For an US comparison, think New England.
"'Tis great confidence in a friend to tell him your faults, greater to tell him his." --Poor Richard's Almanac
While this is a very good offer, it doesn't seem that extraordinary. Bredbandsbolaget in Sweden has offered 10 MBit/s ethernet for a long time with a present price of around $36 per month. That's more expensive than the offer this story mentions, but not all that much. I'm one of their many happy customers. (No, I'm not getting paid to say this.)
i kid you not. nearly every square centimeter of arable land is used to grow rice. (and when not in rice season, usually wheat. Corn is very very hard to come by in large quantities - never will you see 10cents a cob sales such as ones in SafeWay)
Well, that and Japan is physically *bigger* than Great Britian. (granted, 80% are mountains, which leaves 20% for crops)
with so much land devoted to rice, livestock is hard to come by and they import a lot of beef from various places (australia, US, Canada) - in fact there are sometimes commercials advertizing US beef, with cowboys and all that shit - even though that's total bs. veggies are equally few in quantity and lots are imported. Fruits too (fruits and veggies are very expensive)
seafood are plenty, though.
(as to why they don't import rice - well, see if they did all the rice farmers would be out of a job, and we can't have that. besides japanese are very proud of their rice - not sure why, other than maybe japanese rice is about 10x more expensive than rice anywhere else in the world.)
My life in the land of the rising sun.