When I had time to kill between meetings in Tokyo, I dropped by a major bookstore near the Tokyo Station. In the computing book area, I found a special section on cloud computing. Like in the U.S., cloud computing is getting a lot of attention in Japan. The premise of cloud computing is easy access to clouds. Unless you can access clouds, it does not make sense. It has often been said that the U.S. lags other countries in broadband access, so I took a look at what it is like in Japan. For example, most reasonably priced business hotels provide complimentary Internet access. The speed varies, but it is in the 18–25Mbps range. I do not find it extremely fast, because I tend to access sites in the U.S. I suppose the distance of 5,500 miles (one way) does not help. The following is a price list for various speeds of DSL by NTT-East.

DSL Price Table by NTT-East The voice/data combination is cheaper because it is not necessary to draw a new line (the voice line exists). I pay $39.99 for my home (3Mbps) and $29.99 for my office (1.5Mbps), so their services look pretty good to me. They even have fiber services that provide 100Mbps and 200Mbps for $50.40. You can exploit their VoIP service. My Japanese friends are somewhat worried that clouds in the U.S. will dominate computing in Japan. I do not think that will be the case. Clouds need to be physically in Japan to be exploited for latencies and regulatory reasons. So when clouds are developed in Japan, I can say the access environment will be much better than that in the U.S. I have a friend who lives in Saratoga, in the heart of Silicon Valley, and occasionally complains about his frustration with the slow speed to the Internet via Twitter. For some reason, the city of Saratoga does not have any real broadband services. The fastest speed is about 512Kbps. I vaguely remember the minimum speed qualified to be called broadband is 1Mbps.

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		Mining the Cloud to Ease the Enterprise Compliance Burden
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It seems that the U.S. is big on cloud computing on the server side but slow on the access side, while Japan is slow on cloud computing and very good on the access side. The combination of the two would be ideal. I wonder when that will happen.

Tags: Cloud Computing, DSL, Japan