(Nikkei BP Group)
(No.1 High-Tech News Site in Japanese)
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| NTT to Build 64Mbps, One-Way Network By 2002
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October 27, 1998 (TOKYO) -- Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. said
it will deploy a network that can operate at 64 megabits per second
one way by 2002.
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The company announced R&D; strategies of the whole NTT group, which is
being divided and reorganized in July 1999.
NTT President Junichiro Miyazu said that NTT aims to set up an information
sharing business to distribute digital contents on networks so it can
focus its efforts on R&D.;
According to Miyazu's vision of the information sharing business, three
trends will have occurred by 2005, the year NTT aims to establish optical
fiber networks.
The first is digitization of broadcasting and networking of home electronics.
The second wave is contents distribution services by the media. The
third is the age of mega-contents with information sent from small-office
home-office (SOHO) businesses, households, and others.
In keeping with the trends, NTT is going to advance research and development
in four fields: contents, information sharing platforms, networks and
terminals.
As a concrete example, the Mega-Media concept announced in Oct. 1996
by NTT was taken up with a new perspective. The basic line of the Mega-Media
concept is the same: to offer a service to send data at 10Mbps for 10,000
yen (US$85) per month by 2005. However a new scheme was added to introduce
one-way optical communications networks at 6Mbps mainly to areas with
about 100,000 residents (and also to areas with different scales of
population) by 2002.
The reason for the one-way 6Mbps network is that the service system to
be built must be able to receive a download request from a user via
128kbps circuits such as ISDN and OCN services, and larger scale optical
networks should be used as transmission lines for downloading data.
When the service starts, users can enjoy contents of pictures encoding
in MPEG-2 format in high-quality images and on a large screen.
The current R&D; division of NTT will be incorporated into a holding company
after the reorganization. "The R&D; division will carry out all the research
and development of the whole NTT group and promote projects closely
related with each business," Miyazu said.
He also reiterated the importance of forming strategic alliances with
companies outside of the NTT group, as the company cannot pursue an
information sharing business without cooperation from outside companies.
(BizTech News Dept. & Nikkei New Media)
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