Re: [tlug] (off-topic) Unlimited data plan (mobile internet access) in Japan

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

SCHWARTZ, Fernando G. writes:

 > Which brings us to our next question; how these people form their
 > prices... I know NTT is the most profitable telco in the world...

I'm a little surprised by that statement if it's true.  It indicates
that most telcos are in dire straits, as Japanese companies just don't
report reasonable levels of profit (except for Toyota).

NTT isn't (just) a telco any more.  But yes, most likely a lot of
their profit derives from their formerly protected status as a
national monopoly, and their on-going status as the industry leader in
a protected and regulated oligopoly.

There's also the fact that as regulated utilities go NTT had very
little debt because of the scam of making customers pay in advance for
the "line", which for a long time couldn't be resold (except to NTT,
which didn't pay its own list price).  Line charges also were set
unnaturally high because they were based on the average cost of
getting a line to households in 1955 or something like that (due to a
"National Minimum Service" law, stating that every Japanese had a
right to certain public services at basically the same price).  The
reason this was also a scam is that by 1965 the proportion of people
living in urban area apartments (where the cost of a line is a few
hundred meters of copper plus throwing a switch) vs. those living in
detached homes in remote hamlets in Tottori (where you need to build a
new line of towers and string many kilometers of copper to the town,
and then more hundreds of meters and a few telephone poles to each
house, and install a new exchange which is hardly used to capacity)
went up by about 10 percentage points with a corresponding dramatic
reduction in actual average cost.

 > Not hard to think representatives from the main operators informally
 > sitting on a sloppy Shinjuku bar thinking theirs ways of holding the bar
 > high...

Actually, the representatives from the main operators probably stand
in ranks in front of a Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications ka-cho
in Kasumisagaseki, and are told informally (ie, not recorded in any
minutes) but quite effectively just how much they are allowed to vary
from each other in each tariff.