TOKYO (02/08/2000) - NTT West Corp., a local loop telephone operator in western Japan, announced yesterday it has installed its three millionth ISDN (integrated services digital network) line.
The operator installed its two millionth line just nine months ago and said in a statement that use of the digital telephone service has taken off in the last few years as the popularity of the Internet has increased.
NTT West's parent company, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), launched ISDN services as early as in April 1987. To begin with, however, it struggled to attract customers to the service. At the end of its fifth year in operation, NTT counted just 80,000 lines in western Japan, although the subscriber rose steadily to reach 266,000 by the end of 1995, according to NTT.
In 1996, as use of the Internet slowly started spreading beyond universities to companies and homes, use of ISDN began to rise much faster.
Customers switching to ISDN are attracted by the higher data speeds offered by the service -- a domestic ISDN line contains two 64K bits per second (bps) channels. One channel can be used for Internet access, while the other simultaneously can be used for conventional telephony.
NTT has also priced ISDN so that call charges are identical to those of conventional analog telephone lines, meaning there is no price difference between the two services. A heavy investment in the network early on also means the service is now available to customers in all of Japan.
For the purposes of the survey, NTT West said it counts a domestic ISDN circuit, which contains two 64K bps channels, as a single ISDN line. Its 1.5M bps ISDN service, which contains 23 64K bps channels, is counted as being equivalent to ten domestic ISDN lines.
NTT West Corp., in Osaka, can be found online at http://www.ntt-west.co.jp/.