Trends of the IT Society.

(From Journal of Japanese Trade & Industry (JJTI))

Byline: Tsukio Yoshio

Advance of the IT Society In Japan, the IT society started with the VI&P Plan, a long-term initiative announced by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) in the spring of 1990. From having telephones for voice communications in every home, the aim shifted to "visual," centering on image communications, "intelligent," offering various added convenient functions, and "personal," reflecting the spread of mobile handsets. The promise of NTT's initiative was the realization of this kind of society by 2020.

Behind the VI&P Plan was the idea that digital technology would become the predominant communications technology. As a result, we would move from an era in which voice communications were handled by telephone, text by telex and documents by facsimile, to an era in which voice, text and images could be sent and received via a single terminal. Threatened by this concept, the United States initiated an opposing technology - the Internet. The Internet was an innovative technology based on a fundamentally different concept to conventional communications technologies, and it brought economic innovation with it.

With the Internet, communications charges were no longer proportional to distance and the length of time of the communication, as they were with the telephone. Communications even to the other side of the world were charged at a fixed rate regardless of how long they lasted. The charge itself was a lot cheaper, too. For the past five years, prices relative to PC processing speeds have gone down to 1,000th of what they used to cost, while prices relative to Internet communications capacity have dropped by an equal ratio. As a result, the number of people using the Internet has soared.

In 2001, the Japanese government announced its "e-Japan Strategy." The centerpiece was the spread of broadband lines, which offered a substantially higher capacity than existing communication lines. With this technology, the visual communications envisaged by the VI&P plan became a reality. Society has changed to where the movement of people and things are supplanted by electronic communication, and e-commerce and teleworking are now everyday realities instead of just a dream.

Today, a major topic of discussion in Japan is "ubiquitous" information technology. This aims to create a society where broadband communications can be freely accessed anytime and anywhere. The main characteristic of ubiquitous communications is the possibility not only for exchange of information between people and people as in the past, but between people and things, people and places, things and things, things and places, and places and places.