Data Highway Lags in Japan

Asao Ishizuka

The data highway hasn't yet come to Japan. NTT (Nippon Telephone & Telegraph), Japan's largest common carrier, has a backbone that is already 65 percent fiber, and corporations are using this fiber for intra- and intercity communications. ISDN is also available--there are more than 230,000 basic-rate ISDN circuits (64 Kbps) and 3100 primary-rate circuits (1.5 Mbps).

Implementing fiber to the home, or even fiber to the curb (also known as the Next Generation Communications Infrastructure) will be a long, tough road. NTT estimates that the cost to develop the new infrastructure will be $410 billion; if $18 billion is allocated annually for this, the new infrastructure will be built by 2015.

Japan has also experienced a very slowly developing cable business. This is due in part to widespre ad coverage by broadcast TV, a large number of video rental shops, and the availability of alternative entertainment sources, such as Direct Broadcast Satellite, which now dishes out NTSC and HDTV signals to nearly 6.3 million subscribers.

However, some Japanese multimedia network researchers think that the real use of the information highway will be for professional and business applications, not for the home, because of its cost. The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications decided in December 1993 to deregulate CATV and boost the integration of broadcasting and communications by repositioning cable as a core medium. Under the new rules, cable businesses will be able to provide communications services in addition to broadcasting, and foreign carriers will be able to enter the Japanese cable business. Nynex is already getting ready for experimental CATV service in Yokohama with Japanese partners, starting in the spring of 1994. And TCI is starting an advanced CATV service in Tokyo with Suginami CATV, beginning in October 1994.

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Asao Ishizuka is a senior writer in the PC Bureau of Nikkei Business Publications, Inc. (Tokyo, Japan). He can be reached on the Internet at asao@farnsworth.mit.edu , on CompuServe at 74120,1663, or on BIX as "asaoi."