Curt Sampson wrote:
>
> On Wed, 8 Aug 2001, cfb wrote:
>
> [...] in Japan where even a single phone
> > line costs ~US$500 to acquire).
>
> I should think that this would in fact make wireless a much more reliable
> source of revenue. This sort of expense is what pushed me to go with
> a keitai and PHS data, and completely abandon the concept of getting a
> land line.
So... you would be replying to this message using PHS connectivity?
> By-the-by, is there any new news on NTT's plans to drop the one-time
> charge to buy a phone line? Interestingly enough, I'd heard it was not
> wireless providers and the like that objected to this as much as the
> companies who buy large numbers of phone lines. They've apparently put
> all the phone lines on their books as assets at Y70,000 each or whatever
> it costs, and will have to take a huge writeoff if that charge is dropped.
So, lines are valued at as much as 700,00yen but can cost as little
as 200,00yen... which makes the 500,00yen (I wrote US$, but I was
thinking yen) number spot on.
As with any market, there are methods by which you can avoid the
officail NTT fee. The most obvious example is the aparto. that
comes with a line already installed; however, a friend's father,
who work(ed... he's now retired) for NTT, makes side money brokering
NTT land lines. Line cost reductions are probably due to dual
factors: NTT waking up to brokers (who depend on high turnover
makets to make their line investement "work" for them) and NTT
attempting to maintain growth of a very nice cash cow service.
> > Finally, in the land of the great telco experiment(s) (the USA),
> > predictions of free long distance have yet to come true. In
> > fact, if you've watched the trends over the last 10 years, it
> > has become obvious the regonal and long distance carriers have
> > actually increased revenues by dramatically increasing the
> > number of area codes....
>
> While I'm not an export on this, I believe this to be an incorrect
> assessment.
I'm not an expert either... just another self-informed punter who
makes an extremely casual hobby of things telco... Please let me know
if I've ever said/say otherwise.
The cost of long distance may have come down considerably over
the last 10 years (and it has... my international long distance
phone bill is equivalent to my domestic (USA) long distance phone
bill 10 years ago with roughly the same amount of time spent on
the phone). That's progress. The thing to remember is that it
is completely possible to recover revenue lost to "progress"
through volume. People may be paying less, but if the background
radiation on the phone bill goes up for everyone (but "long distance"
appears to be cheaper)... well then, everyone is happy! And this
has happened "local" service (again, in the US) costs twice as
much as it used to.
> I'd disagree with that. "Free" voice service right now would be easy
> enough to run over the Air-H" 7000 yen per month unlimited data service
> if we only had some sort of decent interface to it.
That's the point of the matter... you don't have a decent interface
and that is by design. There are many ways to prevent network use by
design. It's a hell of a lot easier to speak than tap out dot and
dashes. Feature and service progression in cell phones will have a
similar impact. Voice service without your bluetooth whiteboard
marker, video conferencing and voice stress detector will become an
untolerable burden. Sure there may be a few "phreaks" out there
who communicate over an applet based channel (assuming the phone
companies remove delay and allow a phone call to initiate the
loading of an applet on the far-end phone (the security implications
of which I would dread)), but the "service" will be considered a
substandard compromise by the vast majority.
> It would certainly be
> possible to build a custom-keitai that would use this. But more likely
> you'd just wait a few years and make it a software program that you'd
> download on to one of the keitai-computers that are starting to grow up.
I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for the wireless telcos/carriers
to open up their networks to the point that it's equivalent to the
average internet connection (if there is such a thing as the "average
internet connection")... it's just not going to happen... and when
handsets eventually morph into full blown portable/wearable computers,
the "internet" they connect to is going to be very different from the
one you and I use today.
> At which point the telcos may have to come to their senses and impose
> some sort of limit on (or even drop) the all-you-can-eat plans.
They'll do it when they dominate both data and voice markets...
which may or may not happen depending more factors that I can
possibly contemplate.
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Received on Thu Aug 9 17:03:37 2001