(Nikkei BP Group)
(No.1 High-Tech News Site in Japanese)
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| NTT to Start General ADSL Service in Summer 2000
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November 6, 1998 (TOKYO) -- Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. said
it will start a for-charge asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL)
service.
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The service will start in limited areas of Japan in the summer of 1999
at the earliest. This trial service also aims to serve as market research.
The company told Nikkei Communications that its general service will
start by summer 2000.
The interface between the user and the ADSL-link for the service, that
is, the user interface that an ADSL modem will provide, will be 10BASE-T.
Kenichi Narimiya, executive manager of NTT's Advanced Technology Planning
Section, said, "We are still reviewing detailed terms and conditions
for the service. We must first start actual commercial service to drive
forward, although it may be in limited areas."
NTT will announce its international purchasing standard for ADSL modems
in December 1998 or January 1999. NTT's modem standard will be "G.992.2"
(formerly G.lite), included in the ADSL standard specification defined
by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) Oct. 23.
G.lite delivers data rates of up to 1.5Mbps downstream (from telephone
company station to user premise) and up to 512kbps upstream. This specification
is slower in speed than the other ITU-T standard, "G.992.1" (formerly
G.dmt), but it is capable of transmitting data over longer distances
for lower costs.
Narimiya said the reason for NTT not to use G.dmt is that the company
that the 6Mbps speed of G.dmt was not necessary, because the target
customer of its ADSL service is home users.
NTT will continue to work on service contents to provide and areas to
cover, along with purchasing. Area coverage will be determined based
on the results of the field trial that NTT is now conducting.
"Initially, big cities like Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya and other municipal
capitals and their suburbs will be covered where demand for ADSL service
is expected to be high," Narimiya said.
At the start of the limited service in the summer of 1999, east and west
local telephone companies split from NTT will provide a leased line
service called "ADSL Access Line" (tentative name) between user premises
and NTT's telephone station. The OCN (Open Computer Network) Service
Division, which is a long distance telecommunication company, will provide
Internet access service using the ADSL Access Line service.
Related stories:
� NTT to Launch ADSL Service in Summer 1999
� Japan's First xDSL-Based Internet Service to Start
in March
(Nikkei
Communications)
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