What is the average price for broadband internet in Japan? It came up in a conversation and I honestly dont know the answer.
Here are the prices for Itscom, which is my provider. Pretty famous cable company (used to be Tokyuu cable). I have the Kattobi Wide plan, which is 30mb down / 10mb up for 3900 yen a month. Of course, I get cable TV (which I watch for like 2 hours a week) which is adds to it. The fibre connection depends on your building (couldn't get it in mine) but it is synchronous 100mb, and probably runs somewhere around 6000 yen per month. Here is Yahoo BB's DSL prices. A bit faster (up to 50Mb for a little more a month) but it's DSL, so you have to fuck w/ NTT. In my experience, DEFINITELY not worth it since NTT sucks big uncircumcised cocks. Also, an ex colleague of mine's husband works at Itscom. Got mine installed in about 3 days. Usual wait is 3 weeks. In short, it's cheaper than the US. Cost performance is unbelievably better than the US. It's not strange for me to get 250kb/s from torrents. I've downloaded large files (from within Japan) at several megabytes per second. The fibre plans are sickening. I had Usen (first fibre provider in Japan) when I lived here previously. At the time, I think it was 7000 yen per month, and was 100 megabit download, 10 megabit upload. I had 5 WAN IPs... and that was the home plan. O_O
I'm on OCN's ADSL at 12MBPS but the thing is that I DO actually get that speed (almost). Not from one download of course but I can have about 5 or so all running at between 400 to 500kbps plus the upload is quite healthy as well. All for the grand sum of 3500 yen per month (includes the phone line as well) The missus knows more on the prices since she does all that stuff. Yakumo
But isn't the line actually 12 MegaBIT...not byte? 5 Meg x 5 is possible, although I've had very little luck finding that many different providers that can shell out the bandwidth, and have something worth downloading.
ah, so true. But still, 5 or so downloads at 400 to 500 kbps plus a healthy upload all at once is still enough I think. The good thing about OCN is they turn a blind eye (or just don't care) to how much bandwidth you use. When I had my FTP up and running 24/7 they never once said anything unlike JCOM (Cable comapany) who I was once with. Yakumo
The only calls from ISPs I got was from U-sen, and they called me all the freakin' time to tell me I had virii/spyware since I never used a firewall. Got to be really annoying, as I mainly used my Linux machine and didn't really care about the Windows box. I run a small FTP w/ high res pictures & videos for my family to see, but I probably give way more bandwidth to various torrents. No complaints yet. Fingers crossed.
So why is that speeds in the USA don't compare? I am appalled. (Insert obligatory USA-needs-to-be-the-best-at-everything-or-it-will-bitch-LOUD quote here.) ;-) My guess: the Internet companies here are purposely staggering the output in speed so as to be able to keep up prices.. or something. I'm beat. :banghead:
You would think there would be a big competition between DSL & Cable, but they've both just decided to sit on their asses. In Hawaii, the fastest consumer connection was 3MB. :/ I'm sure there's a logical business reason behind it. Namely that internet companies aren't making enough money to warrant big upgrades in hardware overhead. ISPs are stretched thin and going under as it is. The fact that 1/3 of the country lives in a relatively small space keeps Japanese infrastructure prices down... Japan had fibre to the home when the US was starting it for high paying businesses. Denser population = more homes on each segment = better cost performance.
It wasn't always all hams & plaque though. Took until well into 2000 for broadband to become even remotely commonplace... NTT had to be sueued. Interesting story actually.
Competition? :noooo: Why compete when you have a mono/duopoly? Hell, they don't even need to honor their own advertised speeds because they only guarantee "up to" a set speed. It's disgusting how the FCC has basically given the cable and phone companies free reign over (not) providing broadband access with nearly no regulations on service level, quality or advertising. Even businesses get raped here. I specced out the costs to provide broadband access for an apartment complex (20 buildings, 400 apartments) here a couple of years ago. Neither the cable nor the phone company were willing to wire it at the time. Just the pure bandwidth for a dedicated ~128K connection per apartment would have been over $100 for each apartment. Sure, not everyone would be using it at the same time and an OC1/T3 line may have been a bit overkill, but I didn't want to fall into the over-subscription trap. That cost didn't include any setup or maintenance and didn't include the line usage/leasing charges. The whole problem is the mythical cost of bandwidth. It does not cost any more to download 1 MB of data than it does 2 MB, 5 MB or 100 MB. The same routing hardware, servers and communication lines are used. The corporations are still holding on to the "per minute" pricing scheme used by the phone companies. I'm not talking about the actual ISP's either as most of those don't charge end users based on usage (though Comcast is getting close). I'm talking about the backbone providers who charge the ISP's per bit passed through their networks and cause access rate to be artifically and obscenely high. (Yes, I know electricity and component wear might be different with higher loads, but the difference is insignificant) I'm bitter. :110:
I use JCOM, something like 10,000 yen a month for cable TV and internet, but I have some extras like two cables boxes, phone line, etc, that nickle and dime the price up. I just assume that my download speed sucks since I'm an eternal pessimist. Advertised is 30 MB, I think. I think I average about 10k per second, or so it seems. Then again I have 3 computers and my XBOX 360 hooked up all running at the same time. No complaints tho, no down time, no problems, in two years I actually haven't had to call them for anything. The install was free which was nice since my little shop wasn't wired for it in the first place. They brought the cable in from the line, into my shop, set everything up, even installed little cover running boards over the cables to hide them. When I had Yahoo before they just mailed the modem to me. I think Yahoo is using Gigabit service now in Tokyo. Hopefully it will spread down to my area soon, I'll probably switch when that happens. But I'm sure my DL speed will still suck anyway.
Something that is cool about the US, tho, is that you can get wireless broadband nationwide from a few providers. That means you can boot up your wireless laptop from most places and have service waiting for you. I think my city in Japan has a total of 4 hotspots, all of them being in McDonalds, and when I tried to access it once from my Smart Phone it wouldn't connect. I'm looking forward to when Japan actually decides to invest in wireless, or when mobile phone companies give you one rate plan for any call or use within the entire country. Anyone here use Softbank? I looked into their PDA phone. Looks cool, but you aren't able to send text messages to either Docomo or AU phones. Yep. It's 2007. And they just released a $400 phone that can't send text messages to any other mobile phone company phone. Amazing.
I'm with SoftBank (3G service) and I can send messages to AU and DoCoMo. You'll probably find that it's the phone's maker that is at fault. Let me guess, it's either A Samsung, Sony Erickson or a western make, right? For you, Eric J-COM is probably ok but for me they are last. I don't need cable TV since I'm not really interested in what FOX or the other stations have to offer and the movie channels are last. So limited bandwidth, complaining from using too much and a pain in the arse fire wall that buggers up FTP usage are just a few reasons why I never stayed with J-COM. I always felt it was a "play by our rules because we own your line" type company. With OCN I do what ever I want with the line with unlimited bandwidth and speeds J-COM can only dream about. Yakumo
This is what plagued Japan for so long. The original play by NTT (who owns all the phone lines in Japan) was to ride out their ISDN investment for another 5 years or so, skip DSL, and go straight to fibre. An ex-NTT executive started Tokyo Metallic, sued NTT (and won) which made them open up their lines to other carriers. So, in effect, other people could use DSL while NTT refused to. Of course, they decided to offer it so they wouldn't lose money. Long story short? NTT makes a dumb investment (paying too much for a huge ISDN network) and the whole country ultimately could've paid for it by not having widespread broadband until 2004 or so. As for the US, anything other than consumer broadband is a fucking ripoff. Maybe it's that Hawaiian work ethic (the one that states nobody is to do any work) but my old company paid about $300/mo for a synchronous 3MB connection. and it went down all the fucking time.
I'm pretty happy with my DSL service here in the US. It's ussually pretty reliable. It's not the fastest thing and I'm not aware how much we pay for it now (I pay nothing and I'm the primary user ). Downloads are around 200kilobytes per second and upload around 52kilobytes per second. Not lightning fast but it's supposed to be pretty cheap. I forget if it was 20$ a month or 25$ for the first year and I have no idea if that rate is still going. But I could be alot happier with it. Honestly in this day and age living in a fairly big city, why the fuck isn't the internet faster? I mean seriously why can't they link up large cities with extremely fast connections by now? My main complaint is ping time, though faster transfer speeds would be nice too. It seems to me like there was a healthy growth to broadband internet and now it's just sitting there.... Why aren't we getting faster services? I do believe that communications companies are trying to nickel and dime everyone to make loads of money they don't need.
