I had planned to go to the opening of the new Apple Store in Ginza today, and post on it in the blog tonight, but weather and work interfered, so it will have to wait for a few days. In the meantime:

I have wanted to get IP over Telephone service for some time. Here in Japan, various ISPs offer it, and it would cut my international calling rates down to only 6 or 7 cents per minute–a considerable reduction, especially compared to the dollars-per-minute charges I experienced when I first came to Japan under the KDD monopoly.

However, I use NTT Flets to get my DSL line, and they do not allow IP Telephony–about the only service that doesn’t, probably. I have wanted to switch, but in Japan the DSL people have a nasty little piece of red tape: if you want to switch DSL providers, you must complete your disconnection from the provider you currently use before you are allowed to sign up for any new service–and after signing up, it will take up to three weeks to get your new DSL service in. So one must go without the Internet for that long if you want to switch. Something tells me that NTT planned it that way–as it was with me, they have the advantage of being the first to offer DSL anywhere, so they have all the early adopters trapped.

So my current plan is to go off of NTT as I leave for my Christmas trip to the U.S., and sign up for another service–likely KDDi, as they have English support–to begin as I come back from the U.S. That might, however, cause me to miss a few days at either end, but I might be able to arrange for dial-up connections for those few days, and certainly it is much better than going three weeks without.

In any case, IP Telephony is catching on in the U.S., it seems, and is at the center of some debate, as it would allow the Telecoms to avoid a hundred years of regulation, not to mention a great amount of taxation. Currently, the Internet is not taxed (you know they’re gonna do it, eventually), nor is email regulated, and that is how telephony works: instead of using a circuit to send an analog signal carrying a voice conversation, the IP phone call is achieved instead by digitizing the call, and, in the same way that any Internet data are transmitted, the audio is divided into small packets. So you say, “Hello,” and that sound is compressed and then cut up into packets, which are then routed over the Internet; when they get to their destination, they are reconstituted into the original file, and the “Hello” you just said is then played from the local station to the recipient of your greeting. By doing this, not only can the quality of the audio be greatly improved over current phone standards, but many phone conversations can be sent via the same wire that used to allow only one. That’s part of how they save money and can offer low rates.

But they also save because there are no taxes or regulations, that is good and bad: good because it means things are cheaper, but bad because governments lose a lot of tax revenues which they must make up for elsewhere, and many of the regulations are intended to protect consumers.

The Seattle Times article covers the issue pretty well. The lowdown: enjoy it while it’s still this cheap, it will likely not last too much longer.