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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."
omg! that is SUCH a great deal, compared to my sucky 256kb/sec line (that costs 40 !!!) yet another reason to move to the land of rising anime.
Machine9dotNet
Cost of living and land values in japan......before we jump the gun on how cheap this is. Look at the population density in certain parts of the island.....notably where this has been rolled out.
When in doubt, parenthesize. At the very least it will let some poor schmuck bounce on the % key in vi. (Larry Wall)
What's holding them back?
The fact that the lot of them are money grubbing bastards with very little long term thinking ability.
Geography.
Look at how densely packed Japan is. Look at the huge expanses of empty land in the states.
Doing it here means wiring to every single family home. Doing it there means getting 1000 customers per apartment complex you hit.
It's oversimplifying, but it's the truth.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Differences in population is probably a big factor, but I bet the dominant one is the US's government-granted monopolies on both telecommunication and coaxial cable infrastructures.
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
That's $21/month only until Softbank goes bankrupt and discontinues the service... read the rest of the article. There still using the dot com strategy of losing money on every customer, but making it up in volume.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
im moving to japan, whos with me?
I want 2D games back.
for the same reasons why rail based mass transit don't work in america...
Japan's urban and commerical populations are so densely packed that it's cost effiecient to run high speed lines to everyone in a neighborhood... for example, say to wire up a connection from san francisco to san diego alone will probably be more than enough cables and routers to wire up all the islands of japan... high population density = more easially connect user base. same reasons why we don't see a high speed mass transit system that goes from SF to NY here in the states, it will take tremendous infrastucture and capital, as long as us Americans have a good suppy of arab oil to power our SUVs, we're not going to change anything.
If you packed half the US population into 1/20th of the land space, the economy of scale would make it affordable enough. As it stands, to do this in the average US city (compared to the average city in Japan) would be ten times more expensive.
Now there's nothing preventing anyone from doing this in high-density downtown areas in major cities. In fact, there's a company which is currently doing this for all their new buildings. I quote:
"It is also Canada's first fully-wired fiber optic community. Concord Pacific's Digital Neighborhood (TM) connects residents to the world of digital communications with hi-speed modemless Internet access."
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
So Masayoshi Son is betting the company and taking huge huge huge amounts of debt to build an incredible no where else on earth network that has great potential. Making telecoms obsolete and making media outlets change their game to provide on-demand tvshows/movies is world leading pace, but how is this guy going to keep it up if he can't make any money? The whole broadband pipe dream has been alive for decades around the world but recent US bankruptecies of big broadband (cite: XO) argue that whoever builds the architecture is not the likely winner in reaping all the benefits. Its great for the average Japanese getting fat pipe, but the lack of ability to make any immediate profits are detering US cable cos to make great infastructure. Maybe I'm wrong here but this article just pushes the point that infastructue building is a thankless job. This article to me says that US isn't going to be getting ultra fat broadband anytime soon since no one is going to take the enormous (1-2billion reserve) financial hit. So the problem again arises, how is anyone going to make any (real) money by carpeting cities with broadband?
Existing infrastruction is a definate. They wanna make more money on existing pipes, etc.
Profit margins? Well, I think there would definatly be more long-term (5+ year) profit than anything.
Lack of competition. This is an interesting one. I think the competition could very well exist, but it's a lot of funding which isn't available in this economy.
I believe another point is population density. Though people in the sticks would LOVE to have this kind of bandwidth, it's probably not cost-effective to run lines out into a sparesly populated area. Then again, they do run phone lines without worrying too much.
-What have you contributed lately?
The main obstacle to having cool things like this in the US is twofold:
1. Large landmass consisting of major population centers separated by great distances.
2. Massive existing (and functional) infrastructure.
We can't just "overhaul" the system: it's too deeply entrenched. Couple that with the fact that the majority of Americans can live without a lot of this tech, and that's the end of that...
Why bother with the expense and hardship of upgrading a system that, for the majority of people, is just fine?
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The difference doesn't necessarily have to do with population density and size, it has to do with adoption of technology both in the industrial/technological and consumer bases. American companies try to milk every last dime out of a technology before they adopt anything new (HDTV sound familiar)? And even then they complain that it will cost them billions, wah, wah! I have a great idea, bring a Japanese ISP over, snap up some of that dark fiber and see how long some of these lame ass ISP's hold out against a company wanting to actually do something for its customer base!
Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but I worry about the trend toward cheaper long distance, especially cheap international calling.
Why? Well, if you think telemarketing calls are bad now, wait until every business on the planet can afford to call you. Just like spam, but with your damn phone ringing off the hook 24 hours a day.
You can bet there's somebody in Japan who can afford to bug you for 3c/min, if it helps them sell a few more useless widgets.
``Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible,'' as Frank Moore Colby wrote.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins
What holds up everything in American telecoms: The Last Mile. Our most common high-speed internet connections come from adapting the existing infrastructure, namely phone and cable TV. Nobody wants to run another line without justifying the cost. That's why rural areas were the last to get cable (and some may still be waiting!), while there's miles of dark fibre under many big cities.
Japan is a logical place for something like this because the population is so incredibly dense. They wouldn't be able to break even after 15 months, except for that last mile connecting a tremendous number of households. You just can't get that kind of bang-for-the-buck in Montana! :-)
Now, 2 cynical questions:
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Japanese seem to be at least 5 years ahead of the US in many respects, where consumer electronics are concerned. If you've ever been to Akihabara in Tokyo -- an electronics district -- you would realize how much more of a fundamental use the Japanese make use of communications devices. So yes, this might be a bit easier to roll out in Japan, where adoption is concerned.
However, I'm not so sure about the "densely populated" argument. Granted, it doesn't make sense to wire more rural communities -- so start with the densest areas of the biggest US cities. Manhattan is pretty densely populated, and there's a ton of unlit fiber lying beneath the streets. There's no excuse for new buildings that are erected not to be wired with fiber -- and yet, it continues to happen. The biggest reason: telcos have a monopoly, and are content to sit on existing profit margins for as long as possible. If you allowed 3rd parties to provide FTTC / FTTH (Fiber to the Curb / Fiber to the Home) services, I bet you'd see them picking up the pace pretty damn quickly.
And I don't want to hear anything about the US not having had enough time to do a rollout of this scale. When I visited Japan in 1998, they were waaaay behind the curve. At least three NTT central offices that I visited during my stay there had dialup connections to their own backbones in their own offices!
What's holding them back here? Greed. Why should your local telco offer you 12 mbs, VoIP and DVD movies for $21 when they can gouge you for $50 for ADSL alone, and not even guarantee a 1.5mbs download? And they sure don't want it including quality VoIP. Can someone else other then the telco offer it? Not if they have to get the wires from the telco, same problem. That pretty much leaves the cable companies. But then the system who have to co-exist with the existing cable signal, and even if it does do you really expect the cable company to offer this speed and these services a this price when it has a history of getting a lot more for a lot less? Both the local telcos and the cable companies have local monopolies, and have a history of increasing rates that exceed inflation and are extremely hard to justify when you know the facts behind them.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It might be due similar reasons why the Mobile Phone systems in Europe and Japan are so much better than in North America.
In Europe, everyone decided to standardize on GSM for mobile phones. Then, they could focus on providing excellent service and services, instead of fighting over the "basics". They can move their infrastructure forward, instead of reinventing the wheel.
In North America, the mobile providers picked different, incompatible technologies (even within the same company/network!). The idea was to foster competition and innovation. Instead, the whole thing has resulted in an annoying mess, and the customers have suffered.
Europe still has a lot of competition in the mobile phone space, but it is based on open standards.
The same situation happens with the "landline" phone companies. There is a lot of different technology out there, and a lot of "bridges" to glue networks together. Probably the only reason the networks interoperate at all is that they are built on top of a national infrastructure that was laid out before deregulation caused so much fragmentation.
With a more uniform technology base, it would be possible to roll out new services cheaply and efficiently.
You just have to be careful that the whole system doesn't stagnate because the standards are not flexible enough to move into the future, or that one company controls the whole thing, and it is too fat and happy to make progress.
NTT, in Japan, probably has a nice infrastructure that allowed this network to be built. They probably learned their lessons from the Japanese TV and electricity fiascos (they have both PAL and NTSC TV systems, and both 110 and 220 volt power)!
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
How can it cost less than 0, when they can just raise the price on the existing inferior connect and with the FEDs ensuring a 'competitive market' rest assured that they will generate new 'profit' without spending a dime. I can see the lure if broadband was intensly tough market but most places in the US are limited to one or 2 providers.
Somebody PLEASE correct if I am wrong but out here on the west coast, we've seen comcast take-over AT&T's broadband, and in the process, raise rates, institute caps, crack down on home networks, try and filter mp3's, while SBC DSL has cut-off 95% of their newsgroup access, begin marketing their customer information through Yahoo, even though as a regulated utility they had access to information that was required by law, and not segregated from their utility pool, so people REALLY GOT OUTED. I mean once you've gone broadband it takes A LOT to go back to dial-up so the cable/phone company MONOPOLIES really have people over a barrell already greased up...
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
(8) Broom-closet sized apartments that cost thousands of dollars a month
(9) Elbow-to-elbow people in almost any public place, all the time
(10) Haughty disdain for Americans by most of the older population
(11) Expect to work 12 hour days if you get a job there. Be ostracized and frowned upon if you don't. (if not fired outright)
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What i am curios about is the bandwidth required to supply. In my town i think that we would have no issues getting permission to use telephone poles or dig trenches as needed to run wire and covering the initial cost. What i wonder about is how do they pay for the bandwidth? are they linked up to the telephone company? are they linked up to something else?
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It may be more socially responsible, but unfortunately SBC Yahoo sucks big time, so I use Comcast instead. Aside from the price, I have no complaints about it.
Are you talking about the executives, or the shareholders behind them who ignore everything their companies do other than expecting an 8% average annual growth of their portfolio? Investing for retirement? You and I might be part of the problem.
This infamous "last mile" has been holding things up for at least 5 years now. I don't believe that this is still the case. The demand and the hardware are there. But then again, companies like @HOME can go bankrupt while being a monopoly in a high demand market, so there must be many, many things I don't know about business.
Yes, many, many places in the US are still waiting for cable TV. I'm currently just a scant 30 miles from St. Louis, and there's no cable TV, the Satellite TV is shit on rainy or windy days, and pretty much nothing is a local phone call. Don't even ask about DSL either.
(8) Pay $1500 a month to live in an apartment half the size of your current bedroom.
It seems Slashdot posters love to bash anything with INC in their name. It is always those evil companies with all their money. The companies should be forced by legislation to share all of their assets with everyone else because I don't have Gigabit internet access in my house. Why would a company in the current market want to expend a ton of money to run fiber to each home when he is in turn forced (by legislation) to share that fiber with his competitors??? The companies competitors didn't put a dime into the new infrastructure. I look at it this way, a company spends the money for an asset (ie: Infrastructure) and in turn he owns it because he paid for it.. DUH! Just like you own your car, house, boat etc. when you buy it. Looks like some Slashdoters are going to be sharing their homes, cars, boats etc to the less fortunate in society.. It is always easier to waste other peoples money isn't it, but when it comes to your cash (assets) that's a different story..
"So why can't they do something like that here in the States?"
Deregulation and corruption at the FTC. Poor SBC wants it all and can't sell T1's for thousands a month when bandwith is becoming a commidity.
For those who complain about infustructure I say bullshit. Any modern city or even suburb has fiber optics already under their feet. Infact according to an older slashdot article 98% of all fiber is dark. Why? Because Verizon, SBC and others will refuse to let those who laid the wires play on their playground.
Yes not all of American can be wired but why is it that when I lived in Manhattan could not get high speed internect access but at the same time could move to Kansas city and have all sorts of options for half the price? I had miles upon miles of fiber under my feet in New York but had no access to it.
Aren't monopolies great?
http://saveie6.com/
s2m0n,
... no xDSL. Vorizon and others are charging prices (in the east) that are absurd. 128K up and 384K down is not broadband it is narrow-band. ...), but piss-poor planning and management or corruption and lies make failures of US. Today, we should ask our CEOs, politicians, ... "What have you done for US lately?" Most could only Blow-Smoke (BS) at you, without ever being able to provide an honest answer to the question.
Well you did not state the facts professionally, but you got the facts 100% correct from my observations. I thought (and said) the Capitalist Republic, Politically correct FCC and do-nothing Congress might do something as far back as 1997.
I gave up in 2000. There could and should be much better communications services in the USA. I live 40mi south of NYC and still can only get two phone lines
Cable and Satellite TV companies can't figure out how to make one consolidated bill and VoIP is beyond the cable companies understanding. US communications are beginning to look more like a "Banana Republic" phone company with declining service quality and options, and the prices (except all the great "Call this Number" cheap calls) are going up to line the pockets of the Dumb-Don Bell.
Much of the frequencies that the FCC sold are going to waste. Spread-spectrum with frequency-hopping and wireless overlapping regional (T1 or better mobile and home, the wireless local-loop) coverage by multiple companies using non-conflicting frequencies sets never happened. It should have happened, but it did not.
I believe, that a good portion of the unused and/or poorly used spectrum should be taken, back from the TelCos, by the FCC and a significant portion set aside, for the public, as "Open Spectrum" space with some reasonable protocol and standards use requirements.
Folks almost anything that is in Japan or Europe cities, should and could flourish in the major USA cities (NYC, NO, LA, KC,
The Capitalist Republic of US
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
(8) Broom-closet sized apartments that cost thousands of dollars a month
;)
Not really. If you want to live in central Tokyo, it's going to be expensive, of course. You can find one-room apartments (around 20m2) starting at around 70000 yen (almost $600). The farther you go from the center of Tokyo, the cheaper it gets. Also, Tokyo is the most expensive city in Japan. Just go to Osaka or Hiroshima and you'll find 3 and 4-room apartments for a bit more than that (around 100000 yen/month).
My wife an I are living in the east border of Tokyo (half an hour from Shinjuku), and we're paying $1100/month for a nice apartment (photos here). Probably small by american standards, yes, but more than enough space for us.
(9) Elbow-to-elbow people in almost any public place, all the time
No. That's true only during rush hours (7:30-9:00am) and express trains in the afternoon/night. The rest of the time is quiet enough. And about crowded public places, these are only the places where lots of people go: Shinjuku (specially the Kabukicho district), Shibuya, Ikebukuro or Harajuku. And I bet you would pay to be there even if only to see the girls.
(10) Haughty disdain for Americans by most of the older population
This is probably true (I'm spanish, and I've never been discriminated in any way in the time I've been living here). But I guess that the fact that most young people do like foreigners (ie: girls) compensates for it.
(11) Expect to work 12 hour days if you get a job there. Be ostracized and frowned upon if you don't. (if not fired outright)
I'm working in a Japanese company and I work 8 hours/day (like the rest here). Before being here, I was working also 8 hours/day. Anyway, if you don't speak Japanese (or don't want to), you can always find a job in an american company.
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