Washington Post Notices That Japanese Broadband Is Pretty Damn Fast (And Competitive)
from the in-case-you-hadn't-been-paying-attention dept
While there isn't that much new there if you've been paying attention, the Washington Post has an article about how Japan reached the point where it has a highly competitive broadband market that is cheaper and many times faster than US broadband offerings. The Washington Post version does a pretty good job highlighting how opening up access to the core lines was a big part of it (as was newer infrastructure and the much smaller geographic footprint in Japan). It's a pretty balanced piece, and good background if you weren't familiar with the situation in Japan. There is one very interesting point, however, that doesn't get very much attention in this debate and deserves to be highlighted.Whenever the debate comes up in the US about unbundling broadband networks and requiring network providers to offer their wholesale pricing to competitive providers, people say that it will kill those network providers and take away all of the incentive to invest in new network technologies. In Japan, it seems the exact opposite happened. When the gov't required DSL wholesaling to competitors, it certainly increased competition and lowered prices for consumers -- but it also opened up new uses for the network that increased demand for bandwidth. That became an opportunity for former monopoly provider NTT who was pushed (thanks to the competition which drove the increased usage) to invest heavily in a new fiber optic network that provided even better speeds and services. And what's happened? NTT is doing great: "NTT is becoming dominant again in the fiber broadband kingdom," according to a Japanese professor of telecom economics. This is a point we've tried to make repeatedly, but sometimes doesn't get through clearly: while many people fear that competition hurts innovation by making it tougher to profit, the opposite is usually true. Competition drives innovation as the competitors look for some edge that differentiates them and allows them to profit. That edge pushes the innovation train faster and faster, opening up new opportunities to earn even greater profits. The new things that people can do on fiber networks are going to help NTT (and others) make a lot more money than if it had remained offering pokey DSL without any competition.
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Filed Under: broadband, dsl, japan
Companies: ntt, softbank, yahoo bb
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Time Out
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Greed is job #1
The billion dollar rip offs of the DOT COM days
were not enough, they have to pull stunts like this too:
http://www.tispa.org/node/14
Global Crossing, MCI Worldcom, it is all part
of a horse and pony show to sell B$ marketing schtick
to ppl that do not really understand the lies.
But some ppl who worked in the Industry smell the B$
and call them on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fiber#Dark_fiber_overcapacity
Some areas of the country 30 of 31 strands of fiber
lay dark in the ground unlit.
Asychronous Transfer mode cards on Ebay for $12 ????
http://cgi.ebay.com/Fore-Systems-HE155-MMF-PCI-ATM-Adapter-HE155MMF_W0QQitemZ280145131975QQi hZ018QQcategoryZ11182QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
Gigabit fiber converters for $39 ???
http://cgi.ebay.com/CISCO-GIGABIT-INTERFACE-CONVERTER-GBIC-WS-G5484_W0QQitemZ120154420229QQih Z002QQcategoryZ51206QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
It all spells one thing, the supposed cost of laying
out a fiber network is only high because they made
it falsely high.
The cost of power to send flickering light pulses
down a fiber optic strand do not need to cost
multiple millions of dollars a month for just a
OC-3 line when japanese consumers get that run to
their house.
It is just total greed and the US teleco's execs are
screaming rrrrrrrrecord profits.
The US needs to make fiber data a regulated utility
and call it done, and kick out the AT&T monopoly that
as Mr. Colbert says is is the T1000 of Telecoms.
No matter how many pieces we break it up into it
just reforms itself back together again.
It is like the Anti-trust suit didn't even happen.
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This is the hope for the Internet for the ppl
Municipal Broadband...
It is going to take towns interconnecting via dark fiber
and bypassing the billion dollar greed machine telcos
to make it work.
The telcos are going to fight tooth and nail to prevent
this intrusion on their massive cash cow, read all about
the coming internet war.
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Re: It is like the Anti-trust suit didn't even hap
1) easy it is to buy politicians
2) how easy it is to fool the general population with corporate and political bulls shit.
If an American has to read a couple of newspaper articles - forget it. It's lost. (and yes - I am an American)
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Damm those Japanese, they did the same thing to the United States with trains.
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Re:
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I wish the US would realize this and stop restricting everything. Then maybe we'd finally have broadband connections that rival the rest of the world.
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Poor excuses
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Re: Poor excuses
Still, there's a lot we can learn from them, and hopefully we'll learn that deregulation helps.
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Re: Re: Poor excuses
Japan is "slightly smaller than California" (CIA Factbook), Japan is 2x as big as Florida;
Density wise, Japan is 10x the population density of the US.
So yeah, it is an unfair comparison.
Ms. Teen South Carolina.
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Population Density Excuse
and some areas have 30 times the dark fiber than lit fiber.
Distance means nearly nothing to fiber optics, we transfer
data via undersea fiber 10,000 miles, the distance across
the US is a joke.
There is no Good reason every major US city doesn't
have cheap fast broadband other than the Telco's
in power do not want the ppl to have it.
It is "that" simple.
If everyone has cheap very fast low latency broadband
and switched to VoIP their long distance business
would dry up like lint in the afternoon sun.
I said it before and I can back it up with stats
as someone who worked for Cisco Systems, it
is all about the greed, not about serving the ppl.
I have seen the billions in stock options.
Where do ppl think that money is bilked from ?
from the person at the bottom of the food chain,
the end users.
This alone screams it is all a pack of lies:
http://www.tispa.org/node/14
The US consumer should sue the telecoms to
get the $200 billion back and use it to fund
a dark fiber Co-op between major US cities,
and take its earnings and use them to grow
the network as a non-profit government
regulated utility.
Fiber lines run to every cell tower in the country now.
a single fiber line can carry a DWDM signal that
breaks out into many Sonet channels carrying
over 100GBps speed.
The Telcos know this, and think the general population
will never know it, but in time they will learn
just how massively they have been screwed.
The Tispa link above is just the tip of the iceberg.
The last mile can be done with ADSL/VDSL, Wifi, WiMAX,
or whatever in rural areas.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,289893,sid9 _gci213915,00.html#dslsumry
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Re: Poor excuses
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Re: Poor excuses
They still got us beat any which way you look at it. You don't have to make excuses for America. We're just behind.
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Re: Poor excuses
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its not the size of the boat but the motion of the ocean
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Re:
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Re:
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NYC would be easy to wire, NY state isn't.
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Perfect example
I'm not saying this could work everywhere, but it just seems crazy to me that with well over 250 colleges and universities on Internet2 all over the US - and even in other countries and continents - we're not putting the spare bandwidth - all 97% of it - to any use.
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Greenland ...and Greed-land
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Regardless of the desires of the corporate world, or the government. There is simply no parallel to individual innovation. Flight is a good example, so are the telephone and lightbulb.
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Alabama
I'm not surprised though; I'm sure Charter pays someone somewhere to keep it from happening.
What I will agree on is that it is truly sad that I pay almost $80 a month for 3mb speed. Thanks Charter for all that innovation and hard work you do with your exclusive city contracts that you don't have to compete against anyone for in the area; so why bother to better our service eh? We can't go somewhere else anyway.
In fact, the internet has not worked for 24 straight hours without high latency or completely dropped internet; but because Charter is spending money to make their service better? No. Because AT&T is upgrading cable in Georgia..
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Its amazing...
Just look at Nintendo. Nintendo dominated during the years of the NES and SNES. And what happened during the the years of the N64? Nintendo rested on its laurels and Sony came in and took a bite of its dominance. Add Microsoft to the mix and its no wonder that Nintendo has yet to regain its long past glory.
Mind you it is worthy to note that Nintendo did not have the government protection to secure dominance in the game industry like these telco incumbents do. But the point I'm trying to make is that if you do not keep up with customer desire and fight the tides of change and progress you get left behind.
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Re: Its amazing...
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Re: Re: Its amazing...
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Corporate Whores
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A U.S. Tradition
I suspect that in that tradition, we'll do the same with telecom.
How much longer before all the switches and routers are designed by and sold under non-US labels? (they're already *made* in China, for the most part.)
People who visit the U.S. already talk about how quaint and antiquated the mobile phones are. And *those* are people from 3rd world countries ;)
Not too long and traveling to the U.S. will be like visiting a Disney theme park: a journey back the quaint mid-20th...
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Re: A U.S. Tradition
but how/why did we become like this?
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FIGHT THE POWER!
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Ask and you shall receive...
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Broadband DSL
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Broadband DSL
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