Restricted "Unlimited" Call Plan from NTT

Japan's ILEC has an "unlimited" call plan to encourage Internet use in a country with expensive metered phone calls — but the plan is only valid between 11 PM and 8 AM. NTT has a similar "deal" for ISPs.

by Hugh Ashton

Telehodai — what's that?

In Japan, as in many European countries, telecom customers pay a per-minute charge even for local calls. Although the customer now has a choice of long-distance carriers, all local calls must be routed through the switches owned by NTT (the former governmental monopoly). This is a source of great annoyance to power Net users, especially as cable is usually not an alternative in Japan.

For example, in my area, the cable company (only one is allowed per area) refuses to connect to apartment buildings. In a friend's area, only limited liability companies may use cable Internet service (such companies must have at least $100,000 starting capital). DSL has yet to make headway in Japan, partly because the proximity of ISDN downgrades the performance, and ISDN is easy to install in Japan (there are now more TAs and ISDN routers on store shelves than there are modems). Unsurprisingly, the complaints about the lack of broadband have been loud and vociferous (by Japanese standards, anyway).

Restricted unlimited calls
In response, NTT has launched a number of special services to stem the flood of criticism. One, which has been around for some time, is the so-called telehodai service (the name is derived by analogy with all-you-can-eat and all-you-can-drink restaurants). For ¥2,000 per month (about $18.50), the user can make any number of calls to a specified number for no extra charge. This includes the use of both B-channels of an ISDN line, allowing 128K bonding.

The catch? The calls must be made between 11 PM and 8 AM, and according to "Naomi", a source of ISDN information to the foreign community through her company Bricks (www.bricks.co.jp), this has resulted in a night-owl mentality among many users. This is obviously impractical for SOHO businesses that rely on the Net (though a consultant friend of mine adjusted his lifestyle to take advantage of this, attempting to do all his business at night, much to the disgust of his wife and family - he has since reverted to "normality").

In response to criticism, NTT has come up with another scheme.

Restricted unlimited connections for ISPs
This one, called setsuzoko (which can be translated as "hook-up" or "connection") currently works only in the Tokyo (03) and Osaka (06) areas. For a flat fee of ¥4,500 per month (about $42), the user is allowed to connect to the Internet as often and as long as required.

But the connection can only be made through an authorized access point, operated by NTT, to ISPs participating in the scheme. And "participating", in this case, means leasing a line from NTT to the access point, and allowing remote radius authentication through this gateway. Although NTT "guarantees" no busy signals with this system, the bandwidth available to the user is obviously restricted by what the ISP is willing to pay for the leased line to the access point (and to NTT's bandwidth between the access point and the leased line which is not necessarily a LAN connection).

Because of what he terms its "convoluted design and bizarre restrictions" (it takes months to set up, and there are complex rules governing domain names), Tim Burress of TWICS, Japan's first public-access Internet provider (now part of PSINet) feels that this system is far from ideal, and sees it as a sop thrown to the masses by NTT, who are desperately trying to keep their per-minute price structure for local calls and monopolize Internet traffic.

The "experiment" is currently restricted to the two largest metro areas, but is expanding soon, maybe because NTT seems to be frightened, despite years of collecting a sign-up fee of ¥70,000 per line, and charging the customer many times the world going rate for their services, that their infrastructure is not ready to support a mass of users with nailed-up Internet connections.So where has all the money which NTT has been accumulating over all these years been spent? Inquiring minds want to know.

Don't they get it? The Internet's for real!
How is this affecting ISPs? TWICS has not changed its policies, but at least one ISP in Japan (Global Online, recently acquired by Exodus) is moving from unlimited usage to a system whereby the maximum connection time included in the monthly fee is now downgraded to 150 hours per month (extra time is charged at ¥4 per minute, about 4 cents).

Bricks' Naomi also says that ISPs who are not participating in the scheme are losing customers to those who are and she claims to have heard of "a lot" of customers changing ISPs because of this service.

The final word here probably belongs to Burress, who says that "the lesson of the Internet is that people use the tools that the entrenched giants provide in order to defeat them, so I'm grateful to have another tool". Maybe in this never-ending telecom ju-jitsu match, the little guys will eventually topple the giant with his own weapons.

—End