Tuesday, July 6, 2004
Japan sees communication market tripling by 2010
Reuters Tokyo, July 6
Japan's market for telecom-related services, equipment, devices and content will more than triple to 87.6 trillion yen ($803.6 billion) in 2010 as the country builds a networked society, a government report said on Tuesday.
The Telecommunications Ministry's annual white paper said a network linking individuals, homes and businesses will generate additional opportunities for industries such as finance, transport and manufacturing, creating a total market of some 120.5 trillion yen in the same year.
Japan, once an Internet laggard, embarked on a plan to spread high-speed broadband Internet access in 2001 and has since risen to third in the world in the number of broadband subscribers.
In the next stage of the plan, the telecommunications ministry is encouraging the growth of services, technologies and products that will help connect its citizens to each other and to anything everywhere.
It envisions a future when people, homes and offices will always stay connected through a mixture of ultra-high-speed fiber-optic and mobile networks as well as other wireless technologies like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and tiny integrated circuit chips.
Japan's growing numbers of elderly people, for example, would be able to talk to relatives via a video telephone on a fiber-optic network, receive a medical diagnosis remotely at home, control appliances by voice command or lock their homes by remote control.
Outside of the home, they would be able to check the contents of the refrigerator via mobile phone from the supermarket and execute quick money transactions with a mobile phone containing a special chip that can function like a debit card.
While such technologies would be designed to be useful, the report admitted that challenges still remain.
It pointed to persistent differences in Internet usage by age and lack of broadband access in rural areas.
It also said consumers and businesses expressed concerns about security and the potential for abuse of new technologies.
The telecom ministry said in its report that Japan had nearly 15 million broadband subscribers, including fiber-optic, ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) and cable services at the end of March 2004.
Japan has the cheapest broadband access charges in the world, a result of an aggressive price cutting drive by Softbank Corp, Japan's largest ADSL provider.
Charges for bandwidth in Japan are around one-39th of those in the United States.
The report said Internet penetration in Japan exceeded 60 per cent for the first time in the last business year, ending with a total of about 77.3 million Internet users.
© HT Media Ltd. 2004. India News