Leading Japanese MSO Launches
Wireless Home Networking

Print This Page

By Alan Breznick

Alan Breznick, a veteran business journalist and analyst, is editor of Cable Digital News and a contributing editor to Communications Technology magazine.

With consumer demand for new broadband services steeply on the rise, Japan's largest cable operator has started offering the industry's first wireless home networking service to residential computer users.

Jupiter Telecommunications Co. Ltd. (known simply as J:COM) launched the wireless LAN service for its 777,200 J:COM Net high-speed data subscribers late last October, after first testing the product in its Sapporo system for two months. The service is now available in all of J:COM's 19 managed franchises in the Hokkaido, Kanto, Kansai and Kyushu regions, which encompass more than 1.6 million basic cable subscribers and about 7.1 million homes passed. So far the MSO has signed up about 10,000 networking subscribers.

J:COM executives say the company, which has not offered home networking previously, is plunging into the market because of the growing number of Japanese households with two or more personal computers and heavier home computer use. Up until recently, they say, the MSO's Internet customer base consisted mainly of families and light recreational users.

“While computer statistics with respect to the household usage of PCs is not clear, the demand for home networking services is increasing rapidly. So I'm sure the computer equipment numbers are impressive,” says Toru Kato, Senior Vice President of Business Development for J:COM.

J:COM officials say they're also moving into home networking now because their recently introduced 30 Megabits per second (Mbps) cable-modem product is stoking both stronger demand for broadband service and greater use of it. Known as J:COM Net Premier, the new high-bandwidth service has spurred the MSO's net addition of 110,200 data subscribers in the past year, boosting its overall customer count by 16.5%. The older, standard J:COM Net service offers download speeds of up to 8 Mbps.

J:COM is using wireless cable modems from both Motorola and Cisco-Linksys for the service. The modems comply with both CableLabs' DOCSIS 2.0 specification and the IEEE's 802.11b/g wireless standard.

With the wireless LAN service now available throughout its territories, J:COM is plugging the networking service as both a separate product and as part of a larger bundle of digital cable services, which also includes digital video and voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) services. The MSO charges J:COM Net Premier subscribers an extra 500 yen ($4.55 U.S.) a month for the home networking service, a nominal amount on top of the 5,500-yen ($50 U.S.) monthly fee for the high-speed product alone.

J:COM officials see the home networking service supporting other new broadband products as well, including home monitoring and home security. “There are a number of other related service fields that wireless LAN can support,” Kato says. “We're just getting started in this area.”

MSO executives are also exploring the idea of providing a fast, broader whole-home networking service through coaxial cable lines in the home. They say they're now studying the efforts of the Multimedia Over Coax Alliance (MoCA), a coalition formed by cable operators, satellite TV providers, consumer electronics companies, computer industry firms and software developers early last year to craft technical specs for such a system.

Skeptics question, though, just how big a market exists for a cable home networking service in Japan. They argue that the cramped size of most Japanese homes and apartments makes such a service unnecessary for the masses.

“The typical home in Asia is much smaller than the typical home in the U.S.,” says Agatha Poon, senior analyst for Telecommunications Strategies Asia-Pacific for the Yankee Group. “It's easy to carry your laptop around your apartment.”

As a result, Poon doesn't see strong demand for cable home networking just yet. “It's not taking off right now,” she says. “I think it's going to take some time to make it happen.”

Industry analysts also note that, while more Japanese households are signing up for cable modems, cable's overall share of the Japanese broadband market is not growing. As of the end of September 2004, the last period for which figures are available, cable operators accounted for a total of 2.8 million subscribers in Japan, up from slightly less than 2.6 million at the end of March 2004 and less than 2.1 million a year earlier than that.

Nevertheless, J:COM officials, pleased with the growth of their broadband service, contend that the cable home networking market shows promise so far. “As both the capabilities and marketing awareness of the service are growing, home LAN service demand is increasing,” Kato says.

Perhaps not coincidentally, J:COM's entry into wireless home networking comes as major U.S. cable operators also venture into the business. At least two major MSOs—Charter Communications and Cablevision Systems—have quietly started rolling out home networking services to their high-speed data subscribers in the past few months, following in the footsteps of Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable and Cox Communications. Both Charter and Cablevision are now offering wireless hookups of multiple PCs and computer-related equipment to some of their cable modem customers for a monthly service fee.

Next story