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Setting Fire To Japan's Cell-Phone Market
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 07:46:31 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: IKEDA Nobuo <ikedanob () db3 so-net ne jp> Date: October 29, 2004 9:20:58 PM EDT To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Cc: ikedanob () db3 so-net ne jp Subject: Setting Fire To Japan's Cell-Phone Market Three years ago, Masayoshi Son walked into Japan's communications ministry and threatened to set himself on fire. A stunt of course, but he was deadly serious about one thing: He felt regulators were dragging their feet in forcing Japan's Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. (NTT ), the former monopoly operator, to fulfill its legal obligation to connect residential customers to the broadband lines of Yahoo! BB, a mainstay of Son's Softbank Corp. Now, Son hopes to transform Japan's cellular market. His plan is to offer his broadband customers -- most of whom also subscribe to supercheap Internet telephony -- package deals that include mobile service, the Internet, and voice calling. That, he says, would help cut rates for Japanese mobile users, who pay an average of $65 monthly. "I can guarantee that cell-phone prices will be lower if we come in," says Son, Softbank's president. The reshuffling has Son hot under the collar again, but this time he's not threatening self-immolation. Instead, on Oct. 13 he filed a lawsuit against the ministry, calling for the spectrum reallocation to be stopped. "I'm getting smarter," Son says. "It's still business suicide, but it's better than physically killing myself." Specifically, Son wants the ministry to divide the spectrum into three chunks, giving equal pieces to a newcomer -- which Son hopes will be Softbank -- and to KDDI and DoCoMo. His argument: Both carriers are already sitting on unused spectrum, so why shouldn't they face more competition? http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_44/b3906073.htm While you have too many lawsuits between the FCC and operators, we have too few suits in Japan. This is the first case that any company sues the government over spectrum allocation in Japan's history. -- Ikeda, Nobuo GLOCOM, Japan ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- Setting Fire To Japan's Cell-Phone Market David Farber (Oct 30)