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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."
Given that info, I'd be more than willing to sign up for the requisite 15+ months. So why can't they do something like that here in the States? What's holding them back - red tape, technical issues?
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
But between being wisked away while standing on Tokyo Tower to another dimension, having to get Giant Monster insurance, dealing with being either attacked or defended by pretty magical schoolgirls, and of course the nearly daily alien invasions and city-wide explosions with dueling robots - I'm just not so sure it's worth it.
Then again, 12 Mbits is pretty good. Hm....
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Then you can really be turning Japanese...
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
You know you're a nerd when big bandwidth makes you this happy :)
All you have to do is uncap your cable modem. Don't worry about the cable company, they won't ca- [Connection Lost]
Now, thanks to thousands of vulnerable Windows boxes, I now have a combined total of 1644Mbps of bandwidth to DDoS sites with.
On a more serious note, the cool factor of this is outstanding, but I sure hope they're handing out firewall software when they hand out those free modems on the street.
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ok, maybe not :P
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
Let's see here:
(1) Cute Asian chicks
(2) Tons of Anime
(3) Sushi and lots of it
(4) Massive broadband throughput
(5) No DMCA (yet)
(6) Sony
(7) BeOS fanatics
Hell..where do I sign up?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
Here in Sweden, you can get 26 megabits/second, for $45/month. ^_^
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I will miss you while i try to settle to my new homeland and try to learn Japanese (Alas, whatching Bruce Lee movies has not been very helpful). I have to stop writing as my parents are coming to tell them goodbye (I haven't told them yet as it was decided 5 minutes ago.)
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Your faithful reader.
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That's how 99% of all service businesses operate. To cover expenses you must have a certain level of customers. Until that break even point is reached then you are losing money per customer. That has nothing to do with the dot com stragety.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
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
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.
Firstly, Japan is very densely populated,
Certain portions of America are populated by dense people.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
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.
OK, I work in the telecoms field in Japan, and I know the Yahoo! BB infrastructure well. I asked them directly why they can offer 10x the speed at 1/2 the price, and this is the answer.
1) Different DSL encoding standard: they use a set of standards called Annex A, Annex C and Annex H to provide fast DSL over copper. (Incidentally, many of the DSL providers in Japan also provide 8 and 12 mbps service - this is a Japan specific point). Yahoo! BB IS a DSL service.
2) Low-cost all IP network: the back-end network is basically a single gigantic Layer 2 gigabit Ethernet LAN. There is no ATM, SONET, etc. any of that stuff. It all runs as IP over Ethernet. The network architecture is actually quite radical. Fiber links are rented from a variety of sources, at dirt cheap prices.
3) Regulatory support and low prices for access: the telecoms regulator, in a fit of pique, forced NTT (local telco) to offer access to the copper lines for less than $2 - dramatically lower than in other markets.
4) Extremely low cost operating model: customer support is only available via e-mail or web. You install your own equipment. (Incidentally, there are frequent complaints about Yahoo! cust serv, so they finally had to open a call center)
The offering is extremely clever. The DSL modem has an analog phone jack in the back into which you plug your existing phone, fax machine, etc. You continue to receive calls over your analog line, so your phone number does not change. Outgoing calls are checked by the DSL modem and routed over VoIP if that is cheaper. If the DSL modem fails, the analog port simply connnects straight through to the existing analog line.
There is no technical or geographical reason why the Yahoo! BB model can't be implemented in other places. They are using copper lines from the incumbent for last mile access, and a published standard. The real barrier is probably that in other markets the telcos are trying to squeeze more return out of outdated, expensive networks. They don't want to build out a back-end for 10x the current traffic using their existing high cost network model.