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Japanese Online Connectivity Ahead of EU/US
An anonymous reader writes "The experience of getting online in North America and Europe is years behind the internet connectivity options in Japan, the New York Times reports. While here in the US cable and DSL options are still struggling to reach rural areas, eight million Japanese consumers are now enjoying fiber optic speeds at home for comparable prices. The article explores the fiber-to-the-doorstep approach the country's telecoms are taking, with examination of both the ups and downs of such an ambitious project. 'The heavy spending on fiber networks, analysts say, is typical in Japan, where big companies disregard short-term profit and plow billions into projects in the belief that something good will necessarily follow. Matteo Bortesi, a technology consultant at Accenture in Tokyo, compared the fiber efforts to the push for the Shinkansen bullet-train network in the 1960s, when profit was secondary to the need for faster travel. "They want to be the first country to have a full national fiber network, not unlike the Shinkansen years ago, even though the return on investment is unclear."'"
I'm an Australian living in Japan and I've been here a couple of years now. Australian internet basically sucks - ask anyone with half a clue. Coming to Japan meant that I had a faster connection to my home than any company I'd worked for in Australia. (26Mbs down/1Mbs up vs. 8Mbs). It seemed crazily fast. Then when I moved house, I upgraded to 50Mbps fibre. It's what they call a 'mansion-type' (mansion just means apartment in Japan). The building has 1Gbps, and each apartment has a 50Mbps connection to that little black box. I've seen it transfer 4 megabytes a second to a friend of mine on the same setup. And the whole thing costs about $35 US a month at current rates. There are faster plans too. Standard FTTH is 100Mbs and I think there's some kind of family plan where you get 1Gbps to the home and then as many 100Mbps connections as you like hanging off that. I seem to remember a story on Slashdot (maybe last year?), about the Japanese government teaming up with NTT and Fujitsu to get 10Gbps connections to the home by 2010. I can't wait.
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All that you say is quite correct, but there are significant differences between why it is being done in Japan and not done in the USA. Firstly, Japan is claiming that it is not being done to realise immediate profit. I think that is quite forward thinking, and not the sort of behaviour that I imagine we will ever see in the US. Secondly, they also believe that if the superfast network is made available then the innovative use of that network will automatically follow. I agree. Clever people will start to imagine novel uses for such a network. Sure, innovation could also be found in the US if people had a fast network to use, but in many cases they haven't. I think that Japan will become a leader in network usage in small, densely populated areas. That is nothing to scoff at. There may well be many business opportunities that can arise from having that level of expertise.
You are correct in saying that it could not be done in the US in a cost-effective manner. So what? It doesn't mean that it is not worth doing or that there will be no benefits. Perhaps it just means that those benefits will be of little use to Americans.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
"compared the fiber efforts to the push for the Shinkansen bullet-train network in the 1960s, when profit was secondary to the need for faster travel."
Profits and/or speed were not the drivers as claimed. Much of the construction was financed by a US$80 million loan from the World Bank. USD$80 mil in 1960 dollars is approx. 1/2 billion in today's money.
The initial project was originally discussed in the 1930's with construction beginning in 1959 - the Tokaido Shinkansen started running on October 1, 1964, in time for the Tokyo Olympics. National pride was (and still is) the driver, not the need for speed...
Notice that China is following a similar process, with the Maglev in Shanghai running at 433 kph and drawing significant attention as the 2008 Olympics in China are just around the corner.
Also, note that "Shinkansen bullet-train" is redundant - 'bullet train' is a literal translation, thank you very much.
How many mistakes can one make in single sentence?
First, Europe is years behind Japan and South Korea -- those pesky Asians go head to head in wiring their countries. Europe, even Western isn't uniformly connected, there are years worth of difference between the countries. North America isn't uniform either: Cannada is basically on pair with Western Europe, while US fell years behind even some Eastern European countries.
I mean, I live in Warsaw/Poland, far from the city centre and I have a choice of two physical cable operators, and two physical DSL operators. On top of that, one of the DSL operators (TPSA) is a monopolist (dominant operator in today lingo) wich by law has to sell BSA and WLR to dozen or so virtual DSL operators which compete with each other and with TPSA. I don't think you can get this kind of choice even in NY, which is a part of megalopolis with the biggest population on Earth and one of the biggest population densities in the world.
Wroclaw (Breslau for those teutonically inclined) is a much smaller city, yet it had fiber laid in sewers couple of years ago, reaching all parts of the city with speeds up to 100Mbps.
And don't even get me started on municipal and private wifi networks in rural areas... They just work, selling not only IP, but also phone services based on VoIP.
Robert
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
In May I went to Tolyatti, Russia. About 1 million people living there. It's not a grown city, but a planned one. Huge Plattenbaus with more than 600 apartments each.
The family I lived with had a 8Mbit/s down / 256 kbit/s up ADSL connection. Pretty nice for Russia, I thought. One day they told me, that someone would come "to make the Internet faster". Ok, I thought. What will happen, it's already fast. Install some Voodoo software to tweak IP option optimized for ADSL?
The next day some people from the Internet provider came by with tools and stuff. One of the guys had a Toolbox labeled with "Splicemaster 2000" and my jaw fell down. They really got fiberoptics to the home. Synchronous 100Mbit/s. But as far as I know, most Internat access is prepaid. You buy a prepaid card for say 500 MB for about 50 Rubels (~2 US$), enter the pin code via phone and then you can surf.
`dd if=/dev/sig ibs=120 count=1`
NY's actually pretty easy to explain. A quick history lesson:
Their infrastructure is a mess. It's old, it's outdated, and the scary thing is that nobody really has a firm grip on just how bad it is.
The Queens blackout last year was a prime example of this. It lasted almost two weeks, and Con Edison (NYC's public utility) didn't have any idea what was the main cause of it. Every time they patched the hole, another part of the system would fail catastrophically.
Earlier this year, a portion of 42nd street exploded, because a hundred-year-old steam pipe failed. The particular pipe had never been tested, and the steam system evidently does not have any sort of system to shut off the flow in the event of an explosive decompression.
Have you been on one of the Subways recently? How about Penn Station? NYC still doesn't have ATO on its subways, and uses an ancient interlocking system that forces the trains to run at wider intervals than they could. There was a fire a few years back in a room full of relays and other electrical equipment that dated back to the subway's original construction. It was feared that that line would be offline for years, as the only people who knew about the equipment in that room had been dead for decades, and there were no accurate or plans of how to rebuild the room.
They're currently in the process of building a new subway. One of the most expensive parts of the project is just going to be locating and moving existing infrastructure, because the city doesn't have a terribly good idea of what's buried underground, and moreover what's still being used and what's abandoned.
New York City was one of the last places on the planet where you could buy DC off of the grid. Many older buildings had lifts that were old enough to pre-date alternating current. It was finally discontinued last year, as DC power transmission is horrendously inefficient.
A few years ago, a lady was electrocuted after touching a metal streetpole. In the investigation that followed, Con Edison discovered hundreds of poles and metallic surfaces with hazardous levels of stray voltage in them, all in public places.
These examples pretty strongly support the hypothesis that New York's infrastructure is in a scary state. I'm not terribly surprised that the telecom systems aren't completely up to snuff -- they've got a host of other things to work on. NYC's infrastructure was hastily constructed in the early 20th century, and then neglected for the remainder of it. Now the money's finally in place, and something's being done about it, but it's still going to be a while before we see any tangible results. There are Verizon and ConEd trucks on every corner laying new cable -- just give it patience, and it'll eventually get done.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
I think Americans are using the population density as a bad excuse for their horrible connections.Check out the following map from NASA showing light density which correlates to population density.
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/earth_night.jpg
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