Japan's Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future by Blaine Harden, The Washington Post, August 29, 2007.Excerpts:
DSL in Japan is often five to 10 times as fast as what is widely offered by U.S. cable providers, generally viewed as the fastest American carriers. (Cable has not been much of a player in Japan.)
Perhaps more important, competition in Japan gave a kick in the pants to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), once a government-controlled enterprise and still Japan's largest phone company. With the help of government subsidies and tax breaks, NTT launched a nationwide build-out of fiber-optic lines to homes, making the lower-capacity copper wires obsolete......
Japan's leap forward, as the United States has lost ground among major industrialized countries in providing high-speed broadband connections, has frustrated many American high-tech innovators.
"The experience of the last seven years shows that sometimes you need a strong federal regulatory framework to ensure that competition happens in a way that is constructive," said Vinton G. Cerf, a vice president at Google.
Japan's lead in speed is worrisome because it will shift Internet innovation away from the United States, warns Cerf, who is widely credited with helping to invent some of the Internet's basic architecture. "Once you have very high speeds, I guarantee that people will figure out things to do with it that they haven't done before," he said.
As a champion of Japanese-style competition through regulation, Cerf supports "net neutrality" legislation now pending in Congress. It would mandate that phone and cable companies treat all online traffic equally, without imposing higher tolls for certain content.
The proposed laws would probably save billions for companies such as Google and Yahoo, but consumer advocates say they would also save money for most home Internet users.
U.S. phone and cable companies, which control about 98 percent of the country's broadband market, strongly oppose the proposed laws, saying they would discourage the huge investments needed to upgrade broadband speed.
Yet the story of how Japan outclassed the United States in the provision of better, cheaper Internet service suggests that forceful government regulation can pay substantial dividends.
The opening of Japan's copper phone lines to DSL competition launched a "virtuous cycle" of ever-increasing speed, said Cisco's Pepper. The cycle began shortly after Japanese politicians -- fretting about an Internet system that in 2000 was slower and more expensive than what existed in the United States -- decided to "unbundle" copper lines.
1 comment:
There are limitations though, that probably mean the Japanese style wouldn't work here.
For one thing, the US has exponentially more land to cover. Laying that broadband here would, likewise, be exponentially more expensive. This is not to say we shouldn't be investing more -- we should. We should just adjust expectations. Or rather, we shouldn't let ourselves feel too bad about not matching Japan right now.
Second, I think it actually more likely that regulation would scare off potential investors. The Dorgan-Snowe bill in the Senate now would limit ISPs options for monetizing their pipes. Wall Street wouldn't like that.
Third, Japanese businesses have always existed under a tighter regulatory framework, and there's no reason to think that would necessarily work here. In fact, look at Japan's moribund economy over the past decade. It's not so clear that it works well in Japan, anyway.
One last note -- I work with Hands Off the Internet, a group that does include some ISPs. Some will say we are "against" net neutrality, and that's not quite right. We are skeptical of many claims by Save the Internet and others, and we do oppose prophylactic regulation. However, the FCC's principles of net neutrality are terrific, and our members agree with them. Thanks!
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