Quoting NTT sources, last Saturday's Nikkei reported that NTT's fixed line subscribers will fall to a 10 year low, below 60 million, by the end of March 2004, down 2% on March 2003.
Decline said to be caused by cellphone use (79,787,200 at the end of Dec. 2003 -- Japan's population is 127 million) and rise of DSL lines which compete with NTT's ISDN. ISDN is at around 8.8 million lines, down 1.3 million from March 2003.
It's cellphones. Just wait for flat rate mobile.
There's still a long way to go until using a cellphone connection for Internet access is cost-effective.
I sent and received e-mail last week for about three minutes over Vodafone's 3G packet network. Even with the packet discount they offer (0.04 yen per packet rather than 0.2 yen) it still cost me several hundred yen.
Any type of flat-rate system which is competitive with ADSL or WLAN services would lose them huge amounts of potential income.
Martyn
Posted by: Martyn | February 04, 2004 at 09:01 AM
Not sure what you think, but it seems to me that adsl coverage is reaching saturation in Japan. The lengths ISPs ar eprepared to go to in order to sign up new customers smacks of desperation. If FTTH and cable do continue to make slow progress, and the ADSL boom does peak at 10 million or so, the number of subscriber lines could continue to slowly decrease. Then there are the effects of the ageing population, which may mean more people living in less households...
Posted by: Gary Garner | February 05, 2004 at 05:08 PM
Hi Gary,
I think the broadband sign-up campaigns are more a sign of the competition here (which has given us the cheapest, in a relative sense, broadband access in the world). I also think it shows just how many potential customers there still are and the potential power that companines like Softbank think they will be able to win by controlling the access line. The net monthly increase is still very strong at around 400,000 to 500,000 users.
Posted by: Martyn | February 06, 2004 at 07:40 AM
Hi Martyn,
Competition is definitely a factor in the 'desperation' I sense. But the increase in DSL lines IS slowing - the last few months have seen net increases of 320,000 and 360,000 DSL lines, rather than the 500,000 we were regularly seeing a year ago.
http://www.soumu.go.jp/joho_tsusin/eng/Statistics/dsl/index.html
Posted by: Gary Garner | February 06, 2004 at 10:06 AM
I'll upload the December file.
DSL providers are certainly advertising hard -- saw a YahooBB! stall in the street across from my apartment last weekend. That's Kachidoki, not the busiest of places. Son's spent hundreds of millions on customer acquisition. I don't get it, revenues are so low/margins tight.
All the same, I think we'll see around 300,000 new DSL subscribers/month for a while, and total new broadband subs (DSL, fiber and cable) at over 400,000/month through the year. DSL's so cheap, I can't see why people on dial-up won't continue to switch. And as mentioned, still see heavy advertising, and Wi-Fi equipment is given a lot of shelf space in the stores (people taking broadband.) I'm sure there will be bad months, the month following a bonus month, typically bad months like July, etc. -- which I think last year coincided with the end of a very big Yahoo!BB free campaign and saw a big drop in new subscriptions.
Posted by: Adam | February 06, 2004 at 07:39 PM