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Putting the pedal to the DSL metal

Later today sometime we will be getting our current 1.5Mbps ADSL internet service upgraded to 12Mbps. It’s supposed to be a flip of the switch kind of thing (I’ve already changed the modem), but I’m not holding my breath. When we first got DSL last April, NTT‘s software (which was really Efficient Networks’ EnterNet software in an NTT wrapper) refused to work with my computer, and knowing there was no way I was going to be able to talk with our provider’s tech support, let alone have Naoko talk to them, I spent 5 frustrating hours fooling with the thing until I finally was able to find the freeware RASPPPOE software, which has since been performing like a champ all these months. So, if I’m not around for a while, you’ll know why.

Along with a few other things, count DSL in Japan as one of those consumer items which is not only affordable, but downright cheap. In fact, if you have a 56K dial-up connection in Japan, you pay more. Currently, we pay ¥3,250 ($27) per month, which breaks down as ¥2,340 to NTT, ¥490 to our ISP (this will soon be going up to ¥850 once a special campaign ends), and ¥420 for renting the modem (also to NTT). And how much will we pay for the new upgraded service, which in theory would be giving us download speeds 8 times as fast as we get now? A mere ¥90 more per month. (Of course, as anyone familiar with DSL knows, we won’t be getting anywhere near the 12Mbps speed we’re paying for, but it will be an improvement over what we’re getting now and for only ¥90 more, one would have to be a fool not to do it.)

A recent article in BusinessWeek, Eating Asia’s Broadband Dust, looks at how fast the broadband market is taking off in Asia, compared to the US, where growth in high-speed Net access is lagging. Currently, around 300,000 new customers a month are signing up for DSL service in Japan, with total subscribership now past 5 million, and possibly reaching 12 million by 2004. Compare that to the U.S., where DSL has been a mature product for a lot longer, which only has around 6 million DSL subscribers at this point (with double the population of Japan, mind you).

Price certainly has a lot to do with the proliferation of broadband access here in Japan. An interesting article by tech pundit Robert X. Cringely from last May, How Softbank is Betting Everything on Bringing Broadband to Japan, explores the role that Softbank has played in Japan’s DSL explosion, and its cheap broadband rates (some of the cheapest in the developed world). Softbank itself recently announced it had surpassed the 1 million subscriber mark for it’s Yahoo!BB DSL service, even as it continues to sell off its shares of Yahoo!.

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Moblogging

I’ve been getting excited about various endeavours from Joi Ito and others in the “moblog” arena, that is blogging from mobile devices like cellphones. Joi and others put together a special New Year’s Eve moblog event which demonstrates some of the real-time capabilities of mobile blogging (and some of the inevitable problems as well that come from early-adopting).

I don’t have a camera-equipped cellphone, but I have found myself longing to publish entries to this blog from my phone via email for quite a while now, so I’ve been following recent happenings in the area. I actually use my cellphone primarily as a email device, and have built up quite a dexterous thumb in the process of typing out emails on the phone keypad that I might actually be part of what young Japanese call the oyayubizoku. (In point of fact, in the 7 months I’ve had the phone, I’ve probably made less than 20 phone calls on it. I hate talking on the phone, generally, and anyway, emailing costs only about 1 yen per email (less than a US penny)).

Joi has released a mail2entry script for coverting email to Movable Type entries, which looks simple enough but unfortunately is still a tad more complicated than I have the time for, but I’ve got to think a more end-user-friendly app (or explanation of Joi’s script) is around the corner (blogging tools Radio and Blogger already have this capability built in to their products).

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Is the US finally catching up to mobile Japan?

Steve Mollman at Salon looks into whether the US will ever close the technology gap that currently exists between mobile phones and services that exist in Japan and what’s currently available in the US, even as AT&T Wireless touts their new “mMode” service.

For Americans who’ve never been to Japan and played around with an imode handset, there’s really no Stateside parallel to help them understand how enjoyable the experience can be. “I just cringe when I see handsets in America,” says analyst [Mark] Berman. The best analogy may be this: Whereas Japanese handsets are fun, colorful iMacs, those sold in the U.S. are drab, grim DOS terminals.

It isn’t just the phones, or the various wireless technologies at play, Mollman suggests, but also America’s dependence on the automobile. In Japan’s major cities, the reliance of the majority of the population on mass-transportation has created an abundance of what Mollman refers to as “microniches of time” spent waiting for or on trains, time that NTT DoCoMo and the other wireless players has filled with their interactive phones and services.