Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing by Neal Stephenson

Author:Neal Stephenson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: American, Literary Collections, Essays, General
ISBN: 9780062024435
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2012-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

The Miura station of IDC, or International Digital Communications Inc., looks a good deal like KDD’s Ninomiya station on the inside, except that its equipment is made by Fujitsu instead of KDD-SCS. At first approximation, you might think of IDC as being the MCI of Japan. Originally it specialized in data transmission, but now that deregulation has arrived it is also a long-distance carrier. This, by the way, is a common pattern in Asian countries where deregulation is looming: new companies will try to kick out a niche for themselves in data or cellular markets and hold on by their toenails until the vast long-distance market opens up to them. Anyone in Japan can dial an international call over IDC’s network by dialing the prefix 0061 instead of 001 for KDD. The numerical prefixes of various competing long-distance companies are slapped up all over Tokyo on signs and across rear windows of taxicabs in a desperate attempt to get a tiny edge in mindshare.

Miura’s outer surroundings are quite different from Ninomiya’s. Ninomiya is on a bluff in the middle of a town, and the beach below it is a narrow strip of sand chockablock with giant concrete tetrapods, looking like vastly magnified skeletons of plankton and intended to keep waves from washing up onto the busy coastal highway that runs between the beach and the station. Miura, by contrast, is a resort area with a wide beach lined with seasonal restaurants. When we were there we even saw a few surfers, hunting for puny waves under a relentless rain, looking miserable in black wetsuits. The beach gives way to intensively cultivated farmland.

Miura is the Japan end of NPC, the Northern Pacific Cable, which links it directly to Pacific City, Oregon, with 8,380 kilometers of second-generation optical fiber (it carries three fiber pairs, each of which handles 420 Mbps). Miura also lands APC, the Asia-Pacific Cable, which links it to Hong Kong and Singapore, and by means of a short cable under Tokyo Bay it is connected to KDD’s Chikura station, which is a major nexus for transpacific and East Asian cables.

When FLAG first approached KDD with its wild scheme to build a privately financed cable from England to Japan, there were plenty of reasons for KDD to turn it down. The U.S. Commerce Department was pressuring KDD to accept FLAG, but AT&T was against it. KDD was now caught between two sumo wrestlers trying to push it opposite ways. Also in the crowded ring was Japan’s telecommunications ministry, which maintained that plenty of bandwidth already existed and that FLAG would somehow create a glut on the market. Again, this attitude is probably difficult for the hacker tourist or any other Net user to comprehend, but it seems to be ubiquitous among telecrats.

Finally, KDD saw advantages in the old business model in which cables are backed, and owned, by carriers—it likes the idea of owning a cable and reaping profits from it rather than allowing a bunch of outside investors to make all the money.

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