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Japan - scorching ahead on broadband usage
Another factoid from the Parlay conference this week. Takanobu Okada from NTT was speaking this morning on Building next generation networks. he's with NTT Network Services Systems Labs, where they prepare NTT for next generation technologies.
As part of his introduction, he gave the state of play on broadband usage in Japan. ADSL has 13.3 million subscribers in Japan, and typical rates are 10Mb/s down, 2Mb/s up. Costs about $25 / month or less. The big news however, is the uptake of FTTH (Fibre To The Home). this has a bandwidth of 100Mb/s to the home (!!). There are now 3 Million subscribers for this in Japan - this has tripled in the last year. At this rate, people using 801.11G in the home find that it, not the broadband access, is the bottleneck. Cost is $62 per month, an extra $5 per month gives you free IP telephony as well.
Anyoen based in Ireland can only sigh ... and wait.
Small titbit from Parlay conference Osaka
I'm at the Parlay conference in Osaka, Japan this week. A small, but useful statistic from today's sessions was as follows:
- Number of companies worldwide who can develop Intelligent Network applications: 300
- Number of companies worldwide who can develop traditional IT applications : 800,000
This summarises in capsule form one of the drivers behind Parlay - the push to open up the telecom network to the potential innovation and development power of (in theory) 800,000 companies (yes, companies, not developers). Even factoring in the ususal "reality filters" to these numbers - it's a dramatic illustration of how open APIs like OSA / Parlay could transform the telecom landscape over the next few years.