My colleague Takahiro Miyao has just written a short report about a municipal broadband project in a small Japanese town called Haramachi City, a few hundred miles north east of Tokyo. Haramachi has built a high speed local access network using fixed wireless (40Mbps both way), on top of spare capacity in the town's municipal fiber network. Financed partly by central government subsidies. Haramachi City is not the only rural Japanese town building this kind of network, and one interesting aspect of these new communication infrastructure subsidies is speculation that they are being promoted by politicians who are directing funds to help their constituencies and home regions in much the same way as they brought engineering or agricultural subsidies and public works projects in the past. Now this political power may be being directed at ensuring local regions have the best broadband communications available, i.e. it's political "pork" for the Internet age.
See http://www.glocom.org/tech_reviews/jt_review/20040106_s53/ for Prof. Miyao's report on Haramachi City.
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