On Oct 20, 7:41 am, pellicleund...@hotmail.com (obakesan) wrote:
> Hi
>
> back in 2000 when I landed in Japan ISP's were hard to find and it was dail-up
> or ISDN only (with reasonably hefty fees and timed local phone calls). Some
> time in 2001 or 2002 ADSL started to get pushed and the "gaman marketing" of
> Innovation Subscribers Don't Need seemed to result in "fire sale" prices in
> late 2002 (probably with noone taking them up).
>
> I seem to recall that the hand of regulation was tipped by something like AOL
> Times Warner buying into NiftyServe and threatening to close them down if ADSL
> was not rolled out a little more promptly.
>
> My memory serves me badly on this bit of history, but if anyone has any links
> or has a better memory of this than me I'd be keen to hear.
>
When I worked for a Japanese Internet company (1999) most folks had
ISDN. Cable was coming along, and there was a lot of talk at the time
about fiber to the curb and fiber over electric lines. I honestly
don't know what kept the latter from being bigger; with Japan's
obvious infrastructure problems it seemed a really good option. In our
office we had a T1. Sometime in that time frame it became possible to
use your mobile to connect via a cable to your computer; again, there
was a lot of talk at the time about wide area wireless, and I think
Hong Kong and some other places were quick to implement (Nashville
even has it now). But it didn't take off at that time in Japan;
probably too many mountains and buildings. To be fair, though, I don't
think personal internet took off like it did in the US. Japan seemed
to move more towards developing mobile technology.

This site was one of the first in English dedicated to this particular
area; they might have something in their archives:
http://www.terrie.com/

John W.