'We Have to Act'.(interview with billionaire)(Brief Article)(Interview)

Late last month Masayoshi Son, the billionaire CEO of Japan's leading Internet firm, Softbank, announced what might be his boldest venture: founding Yahoo BB, a company whose mission is to provide super-high- speed ADSL Internet connections to millions of Japanese for only about $18 a month. NEWSWEEK's Steven Levy spoke to Son in Tokyo. Excerpts:

LEVY: Why are you starting a broadband company?

SON: I've always felt that the Internet should be much faster, much cheaper to use. Especially in Japan, it's so expensive and so slow. I thought that we should change this, and if nobody else does it, we have to do it. That's my attitude. We couldn't do it much earlier because of the monopolistic situation that [phone giant NTT] has had. At the end of last year, a new law was passed. NTT became obligated to open up [its networks]. I said, "OK, the time has come. We can no longer complain. We have to act."

You are promising high performance for a very low price. How can you do this?

First, I asked myself, if we were to provide such a service, what would be the ideal pricing and speed? Video on demand--full-screen video, full stereo sound, film and music--requires [data] throughput of two to four megabits per second. So I targeted that level of performance, and I have targeted a price of one fourth of what end users are paying today, which is $60 to $80, for narrowband. NTT charges by the minute. As you become a more avid user, the bill goes sky-high. What the end user needs is one fourth of today's price of narrowband and a speed 100 times faster. So that is the target I set, and then I worked out everything around it.

Yes, but how can you do it?

Because we have a strong passion to make it happen. We are determined. Today in Japan, the number of PC-based Internet users is 25 million. In three years it will be 40 million. If we provide 100 times the speed at one fourth the price, the quality of the Yahoo brand and the content that Yahoo has in Japan, we can seek a much bigger market.