Setting Fire To Japan's Cell-Phone Market

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: IKEDA Nobuo <ikedanob () db3 so-net ne jp>
Date: October 29, 2004 9:20:58 PM EDT
To: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Cc: ikedanob () db3 so-net ne jp
Subject: Setting Fire To Japan's Cell-Phone Market

Three years ago, Masayoshi Son walked into Japan's communications
ministry and threatened to set himself on fire. A stunt of course, but
he was deadly serious about one thing: He felt regulators were dragging
their feet in forcing Japan's Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Corp. (NTT ),
the former monopoly operator, to fulfill its legal obligation to connect
residential customers to the broadband lines of Yahoo! BB, a mainstay of
Son's Softbank Corp.

Now, Son hopes to transform Japan's cellular market. His plan is to
offer his broadband customers -- most of whom also subscribe to
supercheap Internet telephony -- package deals that include mobile
service, the Internet, and voice calling. That, he says, would help cut
rates for Japanese mobile users, who pay an average of $65 monthly. "I
can guarantee that cell-phone prices will be lower if we come in," says
Son, Softbank's president.

The reshuffling has Son hot under the collar again, but this time he's
not threatening self-immolation. Instead, on Oct. 13 he filed a lawsuit
against the ministry, calling for the spectrum reallocation to be
stopped. "I'm getting smarter," Son says. "It's still business suicide,
but it's better than physically killing myself." Specifically, Son wants
the ministry to divide the spectrum into three chunks, giving equal
pieces to a newcomer -- which Son hopes will be Softbank -- and to KDDI
and DoCoMo. His argument: Both carriers are already sitting on unused
spectrum, so why shouldn't they face more competition?

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_44/b3906073.htm

While you have too many lawsuits between the FCC and operators, we have
too few suits in Japan. This is the first case that any company sues the
government over spectrum allocation in Japan's history.

--
Ikeda, Nobuo
GLOCOM, Japan

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