On Oct 20, 9:41 pm, pellicleund...@hotmail.com (obakesan) wrote:
> 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).

Well, to be fair to the ISPs, the cost of PRI and leased circuits was
also pretty hefty. Hard to believe that TWICS ran the first dialup ISP
over a 128Kbps leased line, though to be fair, again, the traffic mix
was a lot different in those days.

> 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 no one taking them up).

My recollection is that NTT first started out with something they
called "IP Setsuzoku" which was going to be a flat-rate service
offered at, once again, a pretty hefty price, but somewhere between
the time that was announced and the moment when it morphed into
"FLET's" (with the all-important apostrophe), the price to the end
user dropped dramatically. The rumor was that there was a lot of
antagonism between NTT and the MPT, and the other carriers were all
fighting for a level playing field with access to the last mile. They
had no intention of investing in dead-end ISDN, and would deploy DSL.
So I think after the MPT forced NTT to the altar, it became obvious to
all that ISDN was way overpriced, and so the fire sale, at least in
the urban areas. Out here in inakaville, we didn't get ADSL access
until about three years ago. There are still a lot of ISDN routers
around... they make nice hubs.

> 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.

It might have been a contributing factor, but I imagine the domestic
carriers were a lot more influential. All that no-pan shabu-shabu, you
know...

M