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Japan: VoIP for the Masses With 050
securitas writes "Red Herring has a brief article about wide-scale VoIP deployment in Japan with the introduction of the new 050 area code. The new area code 'allows plain old telephone service (POTS) to seamlessly transition to voice-over-IP (VoIP).' Japan is now the largest country to deploy VoIP. Six companies have bought 8.5 million VoIP phone numbers, with 68% (5.78 million) of the new numbers owned by Softbank BB Phone. At $.010 for a three-minute call, the cost is three to eight times less expensive than regular wireline service."
Hopefully this means that Japan will put more force onto the US government to switch to VoIP. The system is so much more efficient than plain analog lines. Japan does tend to set trends for the US.
If nothing else, DDR Shows us that much.
And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
is $.010 some 3133+ way of writing 1 cent?
It could be $0.0109!
Nobody paid for the call directly. But someone had to be paid to mine the dilithium that powered the warp core that drove the the communications array. And someone else had to be paid to build the communications array. Its called trickle down economics. Do you think that all the LD companies are suddenly finding it in the goodness of their heart to offer flat rate LD? Not bloody likely. One company did it to get a competitive edge, the rest had to do it or risk losing business. Even at flat rate, they're still making a killing at $24.95 a month...it costs them a fraction of a fraction of a cent to terminate an LD minute.
It's very good to see some forward movement in the development of 'real world' VoIP solutions. Let's hope 2004 will be the year when the rest of the world can agree on a set of standards that will allow this technology to bring the global benefits it has always had the promise to fulfill. One of the big downsides to the dotcom bust, was that VoIP was to be the next big area of convergence, and suddenly everyone pulled there investment from it, into bolstering their weakening core markets. With financial statistics for next year looking more promising, let's hope the tide may once again turn toward R&D, and an exciting and innovative future.
Your points are very valid. This is an odd scenario though, people don't need much support from the Telcos to move to VoIP, they just need IP to their home (by whatever means). The TelCos pretty much have to drop their revenue streams or risk losing customers to completely different companies. I personally switched to Vonage about 3 months ago which allowed me to drop my relationships with Comcast and AT&T. In return I've picked up a phone service that gives me all the same facilities that I'm used to, allows me to manage it all over the web and costs me less money monthly. The final boon is their marketing program, they let me (and will let anybody) put a link on my web site that can be used for friends, family and passers by to sign up for the service... if they do they get a free month, I get a free month and we get eternal unlimited minutes to talk to one another. For a startup company the business model looks pretty attractive, minimal hardware, minimal bandwidth management... very different to migrating a fixed line phone business to VoIP. My company pays for the broadband connection to my home, being able to overlay my phone service has been one of the better technologies that I've played with during 2003.
As do Packet8, Vonage, and quite a few others in the US - this is what most people mean when they say VoIP these days, not weird geek-only talk-through-your-computer systems. Vonage is in fact a bonafide CLEC, meaning there's number portability and all the other stuff you would expect with real phone service (I don't think the rest of them in the US are CLECs at this point). The only difference is the last mile to the phone - dedicated old-school copper, or broadband internet. Of course, you can also argue VoIP is just another internet service that runs over TCP/IP networks. Both arguments seem legitimate to me - frankly, I doubt that services that look, act, talk, and quack like ducks will be able to avoid taxation by claiming "hey, we're not really ducks".
I was in an IT position in a national wireless call center environment back in the mid-90's when VoIP was just starting to ramp up. Things have improved since then I will grant you but compared to traditional telco voice service it still is way behind.
Look at all of the things that can (and do) affect Internet data. DDOS attacks, primary global DNS server exploits, BGP/RIP route poisoning, etc. Awhile back Cisco had to distribute a patch affecting practically every IOS version due to some exploit. Plenty of network engineers were patching away at the very infrastructure of the Internet.
The POTS concept might seem old and passe but it's reliability can't be argued.
Even in NA, you can get phone service where every call costs you money, be it in the next state or next door. It just depends on how much you want to pay for a monthly fee. $10/mo and every call costs you 5 cents a minute, $20/mo and you can call within a certain area for free & everything else is 2.5 cents a minute, or $30/mo and all your intra-LATA calls are free and then you pay your LD company $24.95/mo for flat rate LD. Nothing is free.
My puzzle pirates crew has recently discovered teamspeak.
http://www.teamspeak.org
Open source, cross-platform voice chat for games. I set us up a server on my gentoo box. It was incredibly easy and awesome. Web administration interface is really slick. I highly reccomend it. If you have broadband it makes for good free international phone calls.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Regarding the cost, instead of $0.01, the article states :
a three-minute call on VoIP costs between 10.5 and 10.9 yen (about $0.10)
Of course they could have come right out and said 10 Cents.
Minor nit. Japan does not really have that small of a land area. If you were to move Japan over to Europe, it would be the second or third largest country there. (I believe France is the only purely European country that would be larger.)
Japan's problem is on the maps it's right up against Russia and China on one side--the largest and fourth largest countries--and the North Pacific on the other--a fairly empty part of the largest ocean. And, if you look across the Pacific, you've got Canada and the US--second and third largest--to compare against. With all those big spaces to compete against, of course it looks small.
Several reasons for Japan's fast broadband growth are as follows:
As has been pointed out, broadband modems are being passed out on the street by yahoo bb, who's service is cheaper than the phone companies' service. They are doing this at a great loss to try to build volume. They also include VOIP functionality, with calls to the US being charged at 5 yen (about 4 cents) a minute.
Unfortunately Yahoo's availability is limited outside major cities. I live in a suburb of a prefectural capital and cannot get service. Another reason BB rates are rising, is that is is the only way to get flat rate internet access, as even local calls are charged per minute. Yes, ~$20.00 flat rate isps exist, but when the phone bill jumps $40, it is no longer a good deal.
Also, although the bandwidth seems high and the rates seem low, the study probably doesn't take into account the fact that you need to pay both the phone company and a seperate isp for most connections. That can easily push the cost up into the 40-60 dollar range, and outside the major areas (tokyo, kyoto, etc.) the bandwidth rates are much lower. My fastest transfer rate was on a RH iso, about 60k over my 12MB connection. The penetration rates and adverstised speeds only show a small part of the broadband picture in japan.
I'm not sure why the actual phone calls are so expensive, but I do know that you have to buy a phone number there. I think some European countries are similar. Kind of a strange situation, but you pay ~$500? (can't remember, it was at least a couple hundred) for a phone number. Then, when you leave or move or whatever, you sell it. Of course, you still have to pay for phone service on top of that.
A lot of things are priced differently in Japan compared to America.
Not a naive user? I think you'd have to be pretty naive to slashdot your own phone ;) Thankfully goatse.cx loses a lot of impact when someone is describing it over the phone...
"If you're thinking what I'm thinking, you're right." -
Letting the operator own the address is repeating the existing mistake with numbering plans.
increased costs to cover the 'equipment' for this upgrade, then the companies will rake in the profit from the new system without EVER even thinking about passing on the saving unless it becomes a price war. Just like the US networks took advantage of HDTV's expanded signal, to cram 3 times as much low definition stuff into the same bandwidth, triple their commercials, deduct the costs of upgrades, AND increase the cost to users under the guise of a better service which is actually pixelated and inmany cases worse than the analog we had before :(
WTG King George 'FreeMarket' Kickback Bush
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
I live in Japan and have Yahoo!BB and their bundled phone service, BBPhone. The cost to call within Japan is 7.5 yen for 3 minutes. The cost to call the USA is 2.5 yen for 1 minute. The current exchange rate is about 108 yen/dollar, so these calls are incredibly cheap (about 2 cents/minute). However, the cost to other countries varies (usually much higher; it costs me about 25 yen/minute to call my friends in the UK). Anyway, this is much cheaper than what the new VoIP services will be charging, at least according to the Red Herring article. They state the cost will be 10.5 yen/minute, which is 4 times what I'm paying now. Why would people in Japan switch to VoIP when BBPhone is already so much cheaper than botht he new technology and the old NTT service charges?
BTW: the Slashdot post states that the cost is 1 cent/minute, but that doesn't match the article, which states that the cost is 10.5 yen/minute, which is about 9.5 cents/minute.
------- "One of the joys of travel is visiting new towns and meeting new people." -- G. KHAN