 N1
@mycingular.net | I don't get it... I read through the comments here, and I keep seeing these "Oh no, if they become dumb pipes, or people keep beating on wireless networks with these data applications, your service will diminish and costs will go up." Why? Why can't telcos just, you know, improve their service? Look at Japan. In one city, there are more mobile users than most areas in the USA. Among those mobile users, most are going to be using data applications. Their phones have live video streaming. They access youtube equivalents just like we do.
So why can't the USA have that? Why can't our network infrastructure support that sort of stress?
Oh yeah, because there's not enough competition here to warrant any actual service improvements. They just keep raising prices while proclaiming some bull about a bandwidth apocalypse.
Ugh. |
| I might also add that they charge less (at least in my experience). Additionally, Japanese internet is on average twice as fast, and when I lived in Japan I had access to 50/50 mbps service for under $50. I hear KDDI just rolled out 1/1 gbps service to compete with NTT, recently, too.
The difference between Japan and America is Japan forced the telcos to share their lines with other companies. This basically turned the telcos into service companies -- you pay for the internet service and the provider. The service comes from one of a couple telcos; one of many providers supplies the internet access, speeds, e-mail, and other features.
Of course, it's a lot easier to do such a thing politically in Japan because Japan used to have nationalized telcos. America's telcos, though of similar size and power, are private monopolies.
On the wireless side, Japan is just a very small country (though its mountainous terrain doesn't make it so easy as sticking a cell tower in a field like here in the US), so it's a lot easier for a small company to reach a huge potential user base and offer competitive pricing/features. It's also partially helped along culturally, as Japanese people tend to use computers so seldom that many people don't know how to use Word until college; instead, they use cell phones, and so cell phone features are a big area of competition. |
