One of the selling points for Yukari and me about moving to Tokyo was the broad availability of cheap fiber to the home (FTTH). Or maybe that was just one of the selling points for me.
We live near the center of Tokyo, which should be fiber ground zero, but, thanks to the foot-dragging of the local condominium authorities, it’s been almost 2 years and I’m still limping along on DSL.
All of that is about to change. This is a picture of the NTT guys pulling from a gigantic spool of fiber. They are installing the infrastructure all this week and will supposedly be rolling out service to customers at the end of this month.
I’d gotten wind of this earlier (in fact, I’ve already applied for service), so when I saw guys with NTT helmets and cable spools, I immediately cornered one of them and asked them if they were laying fiber for FTTH. When he said yes, I told him that I had been waiting two years for this. He nodded and made reassuring noises, all the while thinking to himself henna gaijin: weird foreigner.
Who cares! 100 megabit per second of pure bandwidth goodness will soon be mine. Joy!
