Thomas Friedman in the NY Times points to an excellent overview in Foreign Affairs of the state of broadband Internet in Japan and Korea by Thomas Bleha, an 8 year US State Department veteran of Japan. Bleha is writing a book on the race for broadband Internet with an Abe Fellowship.
I'm still in the middle of reading the article as it is long, it's a great overview of the state of broadband in Japan and Korea. Broadband in Japan is truly incredible- $22/mo. gets you at least 16 Mb/sec. and a little more, about $40/mo., can get you fiber optic broadband at 100 to 1000 Mb/sec.
Related to broadband in Japan is James Seng, who points us to a great presentation by Sadahiro Sato of Softbank (pdf). In it, Sato explains how Softbank has gone to great lengths to build out a VoIP backbone in Japan to support Yahoo!BB Phone services. Lots of great stuff in here.
One challenge is to understand what does 100 or 1000 Mb/sec. mean? Sure it means things like on-demand content, but beyond that, fiber is something of a chicken/egg issue. It's not clear what that speed of broadband will mean.
I am very much interested in trying to answer that question.
I'm very curious about that as well. My friends back in the states don't seem to grasp the difference. The consider 0.7meg to be broadband vs 16 to 100meg here in Japan and that 0.7meg is still $30 a month which quite a few people are not willing to pay for when $20 a month gets them dial up. Broadband in Japan did not take off until Yahoo made it cheaper than dialup.
I'd really like to know if Korea or Japan with 100meg broadband will end up leading the future with new and innovative ideas that people in the west with slow connections would never even consider.
So far Japan doesn't really seem to be grasping broadband. Sure, everyone has it but is anyone really using it? It could be I'm just not connected enough to see it but as an example, Japanese online gaming market is practically ZERO compared to the U.S. You'd think with all the ubiquitous broadband it would be the other way around.
As an example, there's no Tivo here AKAIK (Tivo uses the net in America to update the listings). Japan, so far, appears only to have the their broadcast TV time signal which is never up to date.
Did iTunes ever make it here?
I'm also really curious if it will actually mean anything in the global market of internet tech. One possibly saving grace is that Korea and Japan speak Korean and Japanese meaning that it's much harder for Japanese and Korean companies to make inroads in the West even if they might have better net tech.
I've heard Korea is far far more wired than Japan meaning that using a computer with broadband is part of a typical Korean persons lifestyle of nearly any age. Here in Japan it seems like most people do email at best.
My "48 Mbps" from eAccess yields 500 Kbps on a good day.
When you said about the dillema chicken&egg, did you mean there's to much speed chasing too few content availability ?
Or is ti lack of practical needs in ordinary japanese homes ( people still figuring out what to do with it).
Tom: Read about you in the NYT. Brought back memories of Charlevoix! If you get this message, please reply.
apart from the positive effects of (hopefully global, eventually) high speed fiber-based broadband, it also means DRM is going to have to become a lot more intrusive to keep up with piracy. I'd expect movies to start being distributed in the same way mp3s are now, via online stores. Quality is no longer a constraint, especially with h.264 - have a look at some Apple previews (Tiger only), amazing quality:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/hdgallery/