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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Internet access in Japan (was Re: BitTorrent swarms have a deadly bite on broadband nets)
> I did consulting work for NTT in 2001 and 2002 and visited their Tokyo = > headquarters twice. NTT has two ILEC divisions, NTT East and NTT West. = > The ILEC management told me in conversations that there was no money in = > fiber-to-the-home; the entire rollout was due to government pressure and = > was well below a competitive rate of return. Similarly, NTT kept staff = > they did not need becuase the government wanted to maintain high = > employment in Japan and avoid the social stress that results from = > massive layoffs. Mmm hmm. That sounds somewhat like the system we were promised here in America. We were told by the ILEC's that it was going to be very expensive and that they had little incentive to do it, so we offered them a package of incentives - some figure as much as $200 billion worth. See http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm > You should not assume that 'Japanese capitalism' works = > like American capitalism. That could well be; it appears that American capitalism is much better at lobbying the political system. They eventually found ways way to take their money and run without actually delivering on the promises they made. I'll bet the American system paid out a lot better for a lot less work. Anyways, it's clear to me that any high bandwidth deployment is an immense investment for a society, and one of the really interesting meta-questions is whether or not such an investment will still be paying off in ten years, or twenty, or... The POTS network, which merely had to transmit voice, and never had to deal with substantial growth of the underlying bandwidth (mainly moving from analog to digital trunks, which "increased" but then fixed the bandwidth), was a long-term investment that has paid off for the telcos over the years, even if there was a lot of wailing along the way. However, one of the notable things about data is that our needs have continued to grow. Twenty years ago, a 9600 bps Internet connection might have served a large community, where it was mostly used for messaging and an occasional interactive session. Fifteen years ago, a 14.4 bps was a nice connection for a single user. Ten years ago, a 1Mbps connection was pretty sweet (maybe a bit less for DSL, a bit more for cable). Things pretty much go awry at that point, and we no longer see such impressive progression in average end-user Internet connection speeds. This didn't stop speed increases elsewhere, but it did put the brakes on rapid increases here. If we had received the promised FTTH network, we'd have speeds of up to 45Mbps, which would definitely be in-line with previous growth (and the growth of computing and storage technologies). At a LAN networking level, we've gone from 10Mbps to 100Mbps to 1Gbps as the standard ethernet interface that you might find on computers and networking devices. So the question is, had things gone differently, would 45Mbps still be adequate? And would it be adequate in 10 or 20 years? And what effect would that have had overall? Certainly it would be a driving force for continued rapid growth in both networking and Internet technologies. As has been noted here in the past, current Ethernet (40G/100G) standards efforts haven't been really keeping pace with historical speed growth trends. Has the failure to deploy true high-speed broadband in a large and key market such as the US resulted in less pressure on vendors by networks for the next generations of high-speed networking? Or, getting back to the actual situation here in the US, what implications does the continued evolution of US broadband have for other network operators? As the ILEC's and cablecos continue to grow and dominate the end-user Internet market, what's the outlook on other independent networks, content providers, etc.? The implications of the so-called net neutrality issues are just one example of future issues. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
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