Japan on the Net!

For those of you who kept the faith, this column is for you. In the newly released Network Wizards survey, Japan has moved up to the number two spot - it is now the second-largest country in terms of hosts connected to the Net.

Every six months, Network Wizards takes an Internet-wide survey on behalf of InterNIC, the governing body of Internet domain names. This survey provides a moderate guess at the size of the Internet, or more specifically, the number of hosts (servers) in the various worldwide domains. The most recent survey shows that the number of hosts in Japan has grown nearly 50% in six months. This is down from the 84% growth of the January-July 1996 period, but still surpasses not only the overall growth of the Internet but the growth of any of the other top ten countries as well.

The US retains a commanding lead in host connections, while Japan has moved up from fourth to second place. The United Kingdom has fallen three places, from second to fifth.

Number of Internet users
I will again try to estimate the number of Internet users in Japan. There are three general ways to get Internet access: direct from an office server, from a school server, or via an access provider. In Japan, online services are still providing mostly special online content, and not offering gateways to the Net as, say, a large service like America Online does in the States.

According to JPNIC (Japan Network Information Center), in January 1997 there were 15,470 registered subdomains (for example, the "co" in "co.jp"). About 25% of those had not been connected to the Internet yet.

The co.jp domains numbered 10,763 (70% of Japan's total domains), and ac.jp domains numbered 877 (about 6%). If we apply this ratio to the total number of servers in Japan (734,406), we get roughly 514,000 corporate servers and 44,000 academic servers. It is probably safe to assume that not all of these servers are up and running, but the difference between the number of registered and the number of unconnected subdomains (25%) can help us make a guess.

Let's say that only 75% of the above servers are operating. We can assume that there is at least one user per server (someone has to maintain it), but there are a lot of other factors to consider: some hosts (like WWW servers) do not provide Internet access at all, academic hosts on average probably serve more users than corporate hosts, and some users are connecting from multiple locations. I believe we can estimate an average of 4 users per corporate server and 10 users per academic server. That puts us right around 1.9 million users.

Lastly, there are now over 1,000 Internet access providers in Japan. These range in size from the very big (several now have over 100,000 subscribers) to the very small (local providers with less than a couple hundred subscribers). I'm going to assume that 15% to 20% of Å@these providers are out of business by now (or near it), and let's say that the top 10 providers have an average of 60,000 users and the rest have an average of 400 users. This gives us a total for dial-up users of about 920,000.

However, calculating the overlap of people who have multiple accounts (at work and elsewhere) is very tough. My own rough estimate after combining the above figures is that between 2 million and 2.5 million people have "Internet access."

In addition, there are approximately 2 million Nifty-Serve and 1 million Big Globe (formerly PC-VAN) users. If we count them in, and subtract some for duplicate accounts, I would guess that over 4.5 million people in Japan are online.

Do you have a different guess? Drop me a note at forest@gol.com.

PointCast KK formed
On February 17, 1997, PointCast and Trans Cosmos announced the formation of a joint venture, PointCast KK. PointCast is famous for its screen saver and browser of the same name. Later this summer, the PointCast Network will start service in Japan (delivering Japanese content).

PointCast can be credited with introducing a whole new dimension to information browsing with its push-broadcast (or "pointcast," in this case) delivery mechanism. The PointCast Network, which currently has between 1.5 and 2 million users, will be starting service in several new regions around the World. Japan is its third venture, after newly started PointCast Canada.

January 1997 Network Wizards survey results
	Jan 1997	July 1996	% growth
Total hosts	16,146,360	12,880,699	25.4%
1 United States*	10,110,908	8,224,279	22.9%
2 Japan (.jp)	734,406	496,427	47.9%
3 Germany (.de)	721,847	548,168	31.7%
4 Canada (.ca)	603,325	424,356	42.2%
5 United Kingdom (.uk)	591,624	579,492	2.1%
6 Australia (.au)	514,760	397,460	29.5%
7 Finland (.fi)	283,526	277,207	2.3%
8 Netherlands (.nl)	270,521	214,704	26.0%
9 France (.fr)	245,501	189,786	29.4%
10 Sweden (.se)	232,955	186,312	25.0%
* The US count includes the .com, .edu, .net, .gov, .mil, .org, and .us domains. Although a domain suffix does not guarantee the physical location of the host/server, it is the best aggregate measure available at present. Full survey results are available at the Network Wizard website: http://www.nw.com/.