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The NYT Compares Broadband Upgrade Costs in US, Japan

Posted by timothy on from the and-it-ain't-pretty dept.

zxjio writes with this excerpt from a New York Times article about just how much networking infrastructure costs vary between the US and Japan: "Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here's how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed. ... Verizon is spending an average of $817 per home passed to wire neighborhoods for its FiOS fiber optic network and another $716 for equipment and labor in each home that subscribes, according to Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. ... The experience in Japan suggests that the major cable systems in the United States might be able to increase the speed of their broadband service by five to 10 times right away. They might not need to charge much more for it than they do now and they would still make as much money."

2 of 257 comments (clear)

  1. Japan Broadband = Dense population by overseasjp · · Score: 5, Informative

    THe cost on this is actually pretty simple. I have been living in Japan for 10 years and yes we do enjoy some really incredible bandwidth here. Most of the population lives in very condensed areas. Greater Tokyo has about 30 million people in an area the size of LA... so rolling out the latest technology in one of the most wealthy and densely populated cities in the world is well... nearly easy if you can say that. Cell phones are the same way. Docomo, Softbank, AU etc.. rolled 3g out YEARS... before the US, simple put because logistically they can. Japan is 2/3 the size of California with 45% of the population of the entire US. 80% of the country is mountainous (ie.. nobody lives there) and half the countries population is centered in 4 or 5 cities. Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Sapporo.. Heaven for Technology fans. In a nutshell, you can roll out new technology fast and cheap because the distances between hubs are short, and the overall physical breadth and width of the network is small.

    1. Re:Japan Broadband = Dense population by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      Here's a hint from rural Japan. A small town in Hokkaido to be specific, which is pretty much the middle of nowhere. Population of 12,000 in an area a little under half of Tokyo "City" (23 wards). More specifically, a population density of 51.5 persons / sq. km versus Tokyo's 14,064 persons / sq. km. That's a 1:273 ratio. We don't have fiber, yet. They're installing it right now. We do have 54Mbps ADSL though, and have had it for some time. We also have 3G cell phone reception not only town wide, but in the mountains as well. The mountain range is the size of Kanagawa Prefecture, by the way, but as long as you're not in the shadow of a huge ridge, you'll get your mail.

      What I'm saying is that it's a fallacy that Japan has high-tech only because of the population density. If that were true, only Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya would have these high-speed networks. Even Sapporo is way too spread out to compare. Yet the only areas that I know of that don't have high-speed internet that exceeds what is available in most homes in large U.S. cities, are the extremely remote villages way up in the mountains, which are even more remote than where we live.

      I believe the fact that 97% of the population is covered with high-speed internet right now in Japan says something to that extent (even though that figure is a bit optimistic). Less than 20% of the Japanese population live in Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya.