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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."'"
Japan is pretty small, so it wouldnt cost as much to roll a new infrastructure every 5-7 years. Unlike the US or Australia.
"[B]ig companies disregard short-term profit and plow billions into projects in the belief that something good will necessarily follow."
We might want to discuss all the various reasons as to why America has fallen so much behind. In the past, we brought up land area and population density while forgetting that some countries in northern Europe with lower density fare better. Nobody ever brought this up even if that's one big obvious difference right there.
The notion that Japan's ability to roll out broadband everywhere is somehow the result of strategic, and forward thinking lacking in the west is so much hype.
Japan is a tiny island. The United States consists of the fairly large part of the North American continent and Europe, taken together, is not entirely tiny either. Of course it will be easier to wire Japan than it would be the USA or Europe.
People that argue that Japan is somehow doing something "unprofitable" to get a strategic gain need to wonder why Japan protects its telecommunications sector to the extent it does. AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and other telecommunications concerns would love to get into Japan, and have been pushing the governments of the USA to get Japan to open its communications backplane to foreign competition, but, really, to no avail, as evidenced by the following cites:
http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/summary_0199-3841226_ITM
http://www.clintonpresidentialcenter.org/legacy/050399-report-on-japan-deregulation.htm
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B0DE5D6143DF937A15750C0A9669C8B63
So sure, you can buy into the hype, but the reality is, Japanese telecommunications are both anti-competitive and comparitively easy to do.
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I imagine it helps that they're not spending trillions on war.
You are spouting bullshit, very fine, very fresh and very pure bullshit.
Why? The city/state of New York and other such places in the US easily have a similar population density as Tokyo. Nobody is claiming that the many remote regions in Japan are as well serviced as its major cities.
But dumb people like you immidiatly take it as an excuse, oh the US has some remote locations therefore big population centers can't have fiber. This offcourse perfectly explains sweden, again a country with far better connections then the US AND a far lower population density. They are however not dumb americans and decided that they would install fast connections were people live.
You don't have to cover the US in fiber anymore then any other country has, just the places were lots of people live. In between these major cities you can KEEP the existing fiber that is already in place. So please tell me again what is so different about japanese cities compared to american cities that the japanese have rolled out that LAST mile of fiber and the americans are still on copper?
Because again if you weren't a dumb american you would know that the US has a fiber network, this story is about the last mile.
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Have you ever tried uploading a significant amount of data to the Internet? It's well known that home cablemodem and ADSL service has low upload bandwidth. But even my workplace has only a 1.5MBps upstream connection. My webhosting account gives me around 500GB of disk space. Unfortunately even if I completely saturated my workplace's Internet, it would still take a couple of MONTHS to upload that much data. Why would I want to do so? Well... backups for one thing. Availability of data online for another. When people in the U.S. need to move a significant amount of data between computers on the Internet, it's often faster and easier to snail mail a hard drive.
Your argument would hold if within the cities of highest density you would get 100mbps or 25 mbps on premise without a problem and without selling your first born. That does not seem to be the case, ergo your argument is groundless and AT BEST only explain why there is no high bandwidth available in sparsely rural area.
Furthermore I keep hearing this argument for, how many years now ? In the mean time many sparsely dense country like your northern neighbors get a better bit rate in both more dense and sparsely dense area...
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We have better internet connectivity than you up here in the great white north.
We've had it for a while too. Of course, advancing rather than complaining might be why your dollar is only worth pennies nowadays.
Why do you people insist on perpetuating that bullshit? Why ever talk about "rural Wyoming"? Why don't you talk about the equally dense and urban metropolises like NY, Chicago or LA? Why don't they have cheap fiber to the home, like japanese metropolises have? There's no fiber to the home out in the japanese sticks either, so why the fuck do you insist on that tired old argument?
Why don't the big cities in your glorious US-of-A have fiber for the last mile? Are they not as densely populated as Tokyo?
The article is about fiber to the home, not for long-haul transport. Even in rural Wyoming there is fiber everywhere, except for the last part to the user. You don't have to lay humongous amounts of new fiber, the backbone infrastructure is already in use, again, even in Wyoming. You just have to make an effort to replace the last mile(s) to the home.
In Japan they are willing to do that, because there isn't an immediate lust for profit. A sort of "if you build it, profit will/may come". For that same reason it will never happen in the US. Because you --as a people-- are shallow, narrow minded pricks with a degenerate obsession for short-term money.
Until the US government is willing to regulate the telephony sector adequately, you will have shitty telephony services and very rich fatcats at the top.
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But if 100Mbit class connection were cheap and you had one anyway (hey, it didn't cost much extra so why not), you might decide that you *did* care about offsite backups. If offsite is as painless as onsite, why not? It's like always-on connectivity was back in the era of dialup -- sure, no one needs it, but once you have it it changes the way you use the internet.
And I can think of plenty of things I'd like to do where higher bandwidth would be nice. Download Hi-def videos instead of renting them from the store (ignoring the difficulties with drm and what not for a minute). Better quality video on youtube. Something better than 64kbps for web radio broadcasts. Not just offsite backups, but offsite network-accessible home directories -- why can't I access my desktop the way I'm used to it on any computer I sit down at?
There's plenty of things to do with cheap fast bandwidth, and as it becomes available we'll discover what they are. It's a shame I can't buy a decent speed connection yet.
And New York City goes way beyond those numbers. So I guess it's all fiber?
New York City: 10,456 people/km (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City)
San Francisco: 6,111 people/km (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_francisco)
Tokyo: 5796 people/km (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo)
Does this say something, too?
I keep hearing this excuse, but it really doesn't add up. I've visited Japan and spent quite a bit of time in the USA. Comparing Tokyo to NYC seems fair; they seemed to have similar population densities. Does NYC have the same level of connectivity as Tokyo? I also stayed in a small town in Japan (Takada, for anyone who's interested), and I've seen a lot of American towns of similar size; do they all have comparable connectivity? Getting the connection to the city is fairly cheap, it's the last mile that is the really expensive bit, and the cost of that is relative to population density.
The low average population density of the USA is often given as an excuse, but it ignores population distribution. If you look at a map showing the population density over the whole world, the western half of the USA, with the exception of a few dots and some very dense concentrations on the western seaboard, is almost completely empty in relative terms. If you confine yourself to the eastern half, you'll see huge areas the same density as Japan, and the rest the same or greater density than the EU.
Yes, Japan does have an advantage in terms of overall population density (although it is far more mountainous than most of the populated places of the USA), but nothing like a factor of 20 advantage for the vast majority of the population of the USA.
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Saying that 100 mbit connections are useless says more about the lack of imagination of the person in question rather than the real lack of usage for the technology.
You have to ask different questions, instead of "do users really need to connect via 100 Mbps?" you have to ask questions like "If an user will download 250 MB of program updates, how long will they want to wait just staring at the screen?" The answer is obviously that they don't want to wait *at all*. You might of course argue that you can install updates in the background, but that's kind of dodging the point.
I have a 2,33 GHz dual core processor. Do I need that much computing power 24/7? Of course not. I "need" it because of the peak output. If I start a program for example, I don't want to wait that one second more -- simply because it's annoying. Or when decompressing a 5 GB archive, I will need to wait a very significant amount of time, so there really would be an use for 100's of times faster processors and drives.
Another point is that even if the real "need" is somewhere around say, 20-30 Mbps, the extra bit doesn't do any harm. There really is no reason to artificially go down to the "real" need.
Your problem is a lack of imagination, nothing more.
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It's yet another example of a different mindset in Japanese corporations and governments than the US. First, even corporations look to what can benefit their own country above others, something lacking in our own. Second, if you can't prove in a memo or Power Point slide how something will be profitable in 2-3 years, US companies don't want to listen. Japanese, Korean, and now Chinese, companies have that long view. They know that Fiberoptic networking will create greater efficiency throughout the country, and, in the long run, benefit all. American Telecoms are all worried about defending their own turf and preventing others from profiting. Look at the fights Google has had over wifi. There is no profit to setting up here, because they would have to fight our Jingoistic policies toward foreign corporations, and Congress is well-known for taking a great idea and fucking it up. We look out for number 1. They look out for everyone. We've seen in the auto and computer industry how that works in the long run. I swear, in 50 years Tokyo will be like The Jetsons and we'll be the Flintstones.