Japanese experiment with ‘advanced information society’

Press, 23 October 1984, Page 38

Japanese experiment with ‘advanced information society’

A full-scale experiment with highly-sophisticated telecommunications services got under’ way in the western Tokyo suburbs of Musashino and Mitaka in September to usher in an era of the so-called advanced information society to Japan, reports the “Japan Times Weekly.” The 30-month experiment with the model system is aimed at testing the technical feasibility of diverse telecommunications equipment linked with a network of optical fibre lines, instead of the conventional copper cables, to provide various new services. Officials of the governmental Nippon Telephone and Telegram Public Corp. (NTT), the operator of the experiment, said that a total of 1266 individual telephone subscribers in the MitakaMusashino area will take part in the experiment as monitors, along with 757 business offices and workshops and 149 showrooms. A total of 360 business firms in banking, trading and electric appliance busiamong others, are

expected to provide diverse information to the monitors through the new telecommunications system which the NTT terms Information Network System (INS). An official said that the experiment has marked the birth of the world’s first digitalised telecommunications services, using optical fibre lines, on a semicommercial basis. The president of NTT said that the biggest goal of the experiment was to assess the telephone subscribers’ response to a set of new services being provided by the NTT’s INS system and called for monitors’ all-out co-operation. Japan’s Minister of Posts and Telecommunications, Keiwa Okuda, said that Japan is on the threshold of dramatic changes from an industrial State to an advanced information society. He called on the NTT to make a full assessment of the impact such society will have on the well-being of the people. A total of 12 different types of the state-of-the-art telecommunications

ment will be provided free and rotated to different batches of residents every six months. Among the equipment is the digital telephone which displays on the screen of an attached display unit the number of callers and telephone charges. Other equipment includes facsimile machines and video equipment linked to a sketchpad on which anything written or drawn comes out at the other end of the line. Monitors will be given access to information on weather, tourism, shopping and others. By using the two-way i communications services of the INS, monitors are able to “telecommunicate” or work at home for their companies. Some big companies headquartered in Tokyo’s Kasumigaseki area plan to experiment with telecommunications by ordering its employees residing in the Mitaka-Musashino area to be monitors of INS.