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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."'"
"(insert country name) connectivity ahead of US"
Doh. That's as obvious as saying "Mortality is the leading cause of death".
'Cause I'm posting from Japan!
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
"[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.
Japanese Online Connectivity Ahead of EU/US
Unfortunately, the "connectivity" is in the form of tentacles.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
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.
Refuse to make a statement in your sig!
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.
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.
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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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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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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.
Because if you compare US and Japanese innovation, it becomes even more humiliating for the US.
Sam ty sig.
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.
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
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.
== Jez ==
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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
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.
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"
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.
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
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."
So, New York city must be 100% on 100Mbs fiber then? And only like $20/month, right?
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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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