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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."'"
Come on. We're talking about Japan. A few small islands with a relatively dense population.
Compare to the US with roughly 30 times the landmass. Yes, we have dense population centers. But outside the major cities, the population is incredibly diffuse.
It's far easier and less costly to cover Japan in Fiber than would ever be possible in the US.
If you did the same thing in the US, the amount of underutilized fiber would grossly dwarf what was actually in use.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Japan was basically levelled in the Second World War, and thus enjoyed the benefits of rebuilding infrastructure following logical planning for the future from the ground up, unlike the US/EU that are saddled with centuries-old cities. It's much easier to lay fiber if you've already got the conduits, etc. for it.
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
I currently live in Tokyo Japan, but normally I live in Sweden, A very sparesly populated country in the northern Europe. I do not agree with the author of this article. I have what they call "FTTH", Fiber To The Home. It is said to be 100 mbit. However when measuring using speed test against servers in Japan I get 2 - 20 mbit. I.e., Extremeley poor. The international connectivity suck a lot, it is comparable to my experience in the dominican republic. I get speeds of around 20 kbyte/s to europe and experience high packet loss. The login procedure is very awkward. While you are not logged onto the internet, you can still access some sites, such as yahoo.jp or even use Skype. You are auto-logged out after a certain amount of time. Since I am behind NAT a lot of things does not work good, P2P or downloading the latest WoW patch takes ages, even when it is small.
:)
I have ordered some ADSL subscription from Yahoo and NTT, but I have not yet recieved any confirmation on my order (was 3 weeks ago).
I talked to some friends here in Tokyo and they confirm that the internet really is this bad; they are used to NAT, low international speeds and very irregular and poor performing national speeds.
Compared to the 24/8 mbit DSL I have in Sweden (we also have fiber in Sweden, but not in the area where I live) the internet service is light years behind, even though it on paper sound very good with fiber to the home and all. At home in Sweden I always get 24/8 when tested against the speed test servers in Sweden. Sweden have excelent international connectivity and uploading stuff to friends in the states is usually done at around 4 mbit/s. The internet is also very stable and I usually have bittorrent running 24/7 resulting in some 1000 GB transfer every month. That would be impossible here in Japan, because they seem to be a lot more draconian about what you may and may not do. For example I may not use P2P applications or use a lot of bandwidth (some examples given, chatting with webcam). In Sweden noone cares and everyone is just uploading stuff like there is no tomorrow; resulting in even faster backbones and better infrastructure since the ISPs must invest more to cope.
Generally I find that many things in Japan is about sounding good or seeming to be good but how it is in reality is not that important. I think a major problem is that they actually do not have that much internet infrastructure, very weak backbone and most networks are build "ad-hoc" without a bigger plan, just run another fiber down the telephone poles and hook it up at nearest station.
But the people here don't seem to mind that much. They use cellular phones for communication and Wii or PS3 for computer games. The internet here *is* yahoo for most people. The only person I have met so far that was a heavy internet user was a foreign worker from Vietnam
Anyhow, back to the article; the article is the result of a combination of Japanese "look good on paper" with the journalist quest for write impressive articles and a bit of "It is always greener on the other side of the fence"-thinking.
The little Sony Vaio TR-1MP that I'm using now tops out at around 24 MB/S in any speed test I can find. My big dual-opteron with gigabit ethernet can pull down high 90s, as can my iMac Pro.
What I find, though, is that I never get anything like this kind of data throughput because most of the web is throttled at a few mb/s per connection and many sites are getting smart to users with download managers and restricting the number of connections at any one time. It's frustrating to have to wait 15 minutes to download a porn^H^H^H^Heducational video when I know my fiber connection is capable of pulling it down in a matter of seconds.
Even using torrents for TV shows, I almost never go above a few hundred Kb/S even downloading 3-4 episodes or LOST or suchlike, as there are simply too few users with fast enough connections feeding the data to me.
If I were downloading Japanese content, that might change, but they are extremely strict with copyright law when it comes to their own stuff and people have been thrown in jail for downloading AND for sharing japanese movies.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
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.
:)?
You'll see it in US. In a global market, if Japan's strategy follows long term success, and US follows short term profits, not far from now (it's already happening btw, US economy is plunging down), Japanese telecoms will outgrow their own market, and their forward thinking would have earned them the cash to invest abroad.
How would you feel if Japanese companies build the US Internet infrastructure of tomorrow
Here in Norway I cannot get fiber to my home in Oslo, but when we bought a new cabin up in the central mountains, the local power company by default pulled fiber along with the 3x65 Amp 400 V power cable. (Actually, what they do is to pull fiber to the local distribution box, then they place a 1/2" PVC tube along with the underground power cable to the building site. After the cabin was finished, they came back and spent 10 minutes blowing a fiber through the PVC tube.
The cost is the same as for ADSL in downtown Oslo.
BTW, Norway has a very sparse population, and this goes double for the mountain areas.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
OH NOES!!! The US lags behind Japan! This may be true. However...
...
1. Telcoms. Yes, the telcoms screwed the pooch. They were supposed to have this a lot farther along than it is. But they're getting to it. Currently, Verizon has ~4 million households wired for fiber. But they are they only company rolling out fiber? And I'm glad it's only one. I really don't want ALL of them digging up my yard every few months.
2. States vs countries. The US is not a monolithic block. Rather, it is a collection of 50 states, each with their own rules, etc.
3. Size. All you clowns saying size/density doesn't matter are FOC. It is significantly easier to wire 50 million houses than 105 million. And when you consider the physical distance between houses, it's even more expensive. Wiring up 20 houses per mile is harder/slower/more costly than 50 houses per mile. US houses generally have more land between. Which leads us to
4. But why aren't the cities wired? Equal density to Tokyo. Well...Tokyo doesn't have a 150 year old infrastructure. NYC infrastructure, for instance, is horrendous. Chicago the same. Pulling yet another new set of lines through there would be a nightmare. Tokyo and a host of other cities in Japan were leveled in WWII. Some almost totally. With a large influx of worldwide money, they started over in the 50's.
Verizon seems to be concentrating on the smaller midsize cities and suburbs first, rather than trying to tackle the hardest nuts first.
5. Customer inertia. Most of the US has had cable/DSL available for a while. Even with it available, a lot of people don't see a personal need for it. Now comes in fiber. Convince me to change. What type of connectivity did the average house in Japan have? Did they go through a long period of 'better than dialup'? I have fiber available, but am satisfied with my current cable connection. I haven't seen a need (yet) to restructure my house connections and billing again.
Are we behind? Maybe, maybe not. But there are a variety of reasons why this may be true, other than just "The Japanese are so much better than the US."