“Japan thrashing US in broadband”? Give me a break.

If you live outside Japan, you probably associate Japan with robots and other hi-tech stuff. And you are most certainly right; there is a lot of high tech stuff in Japan. Japan has developed all kinds of electronics and nifty gadgets. The Japanese are certainly leaders in robotics, but are they masters of the internet? This article claims they are:

Japan thrashing US in broadband
By Matthew Rusling

TOKYO – Japan could soon become one of the most wired – and wireless – countries in the world. In just a few years’ time, the Pacific island nation has shot far ahead of the United States in Internet access and broadband usage, as well as in cell-phone-based Internet access. Meanwhile, most US homes can tap only the most basic broadband, leaving many to wonder whether the United States will continue to fall behind.

From 2001 to 2003, the US dropped from fourth to 13th place in global rankings of broadband Internet usage. As of December  2004, that ranking had slipped to 16th place, according to the International Telecommunications Union. The latest Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Ministry of Information and Communications statistics for the US and Japan respectively also indicate that the percentage of all Internet subscribers in Japan who have broadband was much higher than in the US over the previous 12 months.

The average speed of broadband in Japan is also much higher, at 26 megabits per second, compared with 1.5 in the US, increasing the variety of uses in Japan. And while Japanese broadband is the cheapest in the world, the cost of US broadband connections remains relatively high.

“Certainly in the short term this gap will continue to widen,” said Randall Hula, vice president and director of telecom research at Decision Analyst, Inc. “The aggressive government policy of Japan, aided by incentives and open markets to competition, has stimulated tremendous growth of broadband.”

Indeed, Japan’s government has made broadband access and Internet development a primary focus, establishing the Information Technology Strategy Council in mid-2000. Among its bold plans was the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) initiative, whose objective is to run optical-fiber connections to every home in the nation. Conversely, the administration of US President George W Bush has paid much less attention to the issue.

Phil Weiser, associate professor of law and telecommunications at the University of Colorado and co-author of Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age, said the US government should avoid promoting one technology over another, maintaining that market forces will lessen the gap. “For the US, with a far more spread-out population [than Japan], catching up will depend on … increased rivalry between different wireless broadband options.”

Weiser said spectrum-policy reform is among the greatest hurdles for the US. “Only around 15% of Americans view television over the air” (from the broadcast spectrum), he said.

“A major challenge [for] spectrum policy is freeing up the use of spectrum from broadcast to more valued uses, such as public safety and wireless broadband. The current model … is characterized by government management of the spectrum through command and control regulations, [and] is difficult to reform because of a series of incumbent users who won’t give up their current status without a fight.”

Thomas Bleha, former Abe Fellow, freelance journalist and author of “Down to the wire”, an article on the US-Asia broadband gap in the May-June 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, argues that America’s small and middle-size companies may be left in the dust unless the government takes a more active lead in promoting broadband. He believes Japan and surrounding nations will be the first to enjoy the increased economic, innovation and quality-of-life benefits that broadband can offer.

“I would expect additional economic growth, increased productivity, and rising employment related to the broadband take-up,” Bleha said. “If I am right, Japan and her Asian neighbors will have first crack at innovation for five new markets: high-speed broadband, ultrahigh-speed broadband, 3G, 4G, and ubiquitous networks … The Japanese, and other Asians, will be able to telecommute, enjoy video-conferencing, employ telemedicine and distance learning, [and] subscribe to a wide variety of entertainment, games and services that will be unavailable to Americans due to bandwidth constraints.”

Mike Alfant, president of Fusion Systems, cited a greater population density, the existence of a national carrier (NTT), and especially the ubiquity of mobile phones as factors that will continue to put Japan in the lead. “Mobile handsets are an access driver that will continue to drive usage,” he said.

With a mature and competitive market, the cellular phone has become a jack-of-all-trades device in Japan, and experts say Japan is far ahead of the US in mobile Internet capabilities. Most Japanese cell phones, for example, are equipped with “i-mode”, which, since 1999, has been providing dozens of websites created just for cell-phone users. Users can get a range of services including news, stock updates and personal ads.

“Three-G [third-generation] mobile phones were introduced in the United States only 18 months ago and there are almost certainly far fewer than 1 million subscribers, while there are over 40 million in Japan,” said Bleha, adding that “3.5G is scheduled for release in Japan in just a few months”.

Nevertheless, the US is adapting new Internet technology perhaps faster than any invention in recent memory. In 2004, broadband usage leaped ahead by 34%, to about 38 million lines, according to the FCC.

“We are likely to see enormous amounts of innovation in the next five years,” said Weiser. “Among the interesting developments to watch is whether the two countries’ cell-phone companies become more concentrated through mergers … and how users in the two countries respond to cell-phone-based technologies.

“The development of broadband in Japan in general,” said Weiser, “[is] an exception to the general rule that the US entrepreneurial model – think iPod and Google – are driving US leadership in the Internet economy.”
Matthew Rusling is a freelance writer based in Osaka, Japan.

Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved.

The author of this article would have us a common theme;  the amazing Japanese are beating the crap out of America.  Is Japan the master of broadband technology?  Is America and its weak broadband distribution in danger of being pushed into obscurity by the high tech Japanese menace?  No way.

The central piece of information that is used to show Japan’s advantage in broadband usage is the use of 3G mobile phone technology.  It is an absolute certainty that a larger percentage of Japanese have more technologically advanced mobile phones than Americans.   Mobile phones are the backbone of modern Japanese social interaction.  It would be hard to find a Japanese person under 30 who doesn’t know how to send e-mail through their phone.  Younger Japanese people tend to be very skilled at the use of cell phone technology.  But do they know how to use computers?

Judging from my personal experiences in this country, it would seem that computer literacy among young Japanese people is horribly lacking.  It would seem that the use of cell phones as a primary means of information gathering/communication caused computers to be ignored by most of the population.  The use of the internet and basic computer applications is almost a mystery to most of the young Japanese.  I’m not talking about poor or uneducated people here; I am talking about university-educated Japanese in their twenties.  I could write a long annoying rant on the topic, but instead I will just write a list of anecdotal examples:

• Most Japanese students in the dormitory I onced lived in did not own computers.  There was one small computer lab for the thousands of Japanese students at the university.  It was rarely crowded.

• The public school I worked at had 3 school-owned computers available for 46 teachers to use. A handful of teachers had notebook computers that they used for work, but the vast majority didn’t use computers for work.  An ALT friend of mine told me that his school had only 1 internet-equipped computer for the 60+ teachers at his school.  Apparently this wasn’t much of a problem, since most of the teachers didn’t bother to use the internet.

• Many young Japanese(college-educated, early twenties) who I have talked to have no idea what an Mp3 is.  The ipod has recently become very popular in Japan, yet most people don’t seem to realize there is a way to get songs outside of the i-tunes store.

• A group of 6th graders asked me if I knew what about “online” the other day.  I told them that I used the internet all the time.  They had no idea what the internet was; they were surprised to know that computers can do things online.  They only thought that it was a playstation thing.

Maybe Japan isn’t horribly behind America in computer literacy.  There are certainly large numbers of Japanese computer nerds out there.  Computer stores seem to be expanding, as do broadband internet providers.  But does a higher Mbps mean that Japan is somehow “thrashing” the US?  Probably not; high speed internet is worthless if most people can’t take advantage of its capabilities.

Maybe I’m in a strange and unique situation where I only come into contact with Japanese people who are clueless about computers.  I really hope so.