As Brazil's Ronaldo slammed the ball into Germany's goal to win the World Cup final last summer, Tokyo spectators rose to their feet and cheered wildly. It's almost as if they felt the power of the shot. No wonder: Although the game was being played 50 kilometers to the south, in Kanagawa, the 500 fans in Tokyo saw it live on a 40-meter-tall, 100-meter-wide screen -- a monster nearly the size of the football field itself. "In the future, people anywhere in the world will be able to watch the Olympics and other major events in virtual stadiums," predicts Michitaka Hirose, the University of Tokyo professor who designed the system.
The key to delivering this long-distance soccer fix was a hyperfast optical network that linked digital projectors in Tokyo to high-definition TV cameras in the stadium. For innovative next-generation services like this, the center of the universe is in Japan and South Korea. That's because both have made high-speed optical networks a national priority. That stands in sharp contrast to the U.S. and Europe, where broadband penetration has lagged as carriers dig their way out from a mountain of debt piled up by early bets on wireless and Internet infrastructure.
There's little doubt that a revolution is under way. Most new buildings in Japanese and Korean cities are served by high-speed fiber-optic cables. Two-thirds of South Korea's 15 million households boast broadband connections, compared with about 15% of U.S. homes. And the average speed of these Korean networks is 3 megabits per second, about twice as fast as most U.S. systems. In Japan, some 40% of homes are expected to have broadband running as fast as 12 Mbps by yearend. One big attraction: price. Broadband in Japan costs just $18 per month, less than half the typical U.S. price. In Korea, it's about $25 per month.
In the '90s, both Japan and Korea largely missed the Internet boom. Not wanting to be caught again on the wrong side of the wave, South Korea's government invested $9.2 billion in broadband infrastructure over the past four years and will spend another $11 billion to deliver 20-Mbps services to 90% of households by 2005. In Japan, Nippon Telegraph & Telephone (NTT
) will spend $6.4 billion this year on new fiber-optic networks. Japan expects to bring fiber -- with speeds of 100 Mbps -- to almost every home by the end of the decade. "Japan has suddenly gone from being the worst to the best in the developed world," says Mark Berman, an analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston in Tokyo.
Thanks to these networks, the two countries can offer a dizzying array of services. In Korea, housewives can't seem to get enough of Internet soap operas delivered via broadband. Nearly 150,000 small groceries, car-repair shops, and others use online services for billing and inventory for as little as $25 per month. In Japan, tech companies offer everything from unlimited videoconferencing ($2.50 per month) to unlimited Japanese anime videos (also $2.50 a month). "We expect online content will become a big money-earner," says Yuji Yamagishi, content manager for Fujitsu's network operator, Nifty Corp.
The new networks are changing lifestyles, too. In March, Japan's normally apathetic university students used the Net to organize one of the country's biggest demonstrations in years, against the war in Iraq. At Seoul Girls' Commercial High School, classrooms are filled with Net-linked PC terminals, where instructors in distant locations teach skills such as using enterprise resource planning software, something once reserved for on-the-job training after graduation.
Now, Japan is tackling whole new modes of communication. Sony Corp. (SNE
) is pursuing "grid" systems, using broadband to connect thousands of home computers and game consoles. Ultimately, all the devices on the network will be able to draw on the others, so each gains the power of supercomputer. And Tokyo University's Hirose has a system of cameras that captures a person's image from various angles, creating a video avatar -- a sort of body double. That information is then transmitted over a fast network, allowing others to see and interact with the avatar. Heady stuff. If Japan and Korea are right in betting that ubiquitous high-speed communications are the key to growth, this new broadband era could usher in Asia's Golden Age.
By Irene M. Kunii in Tokyo and Moon Ihlwan in Seoul
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