Communications Regulatory Authority

confirmed as the leading country in terms of revenues from VoIP services, with most of
the revenues deriving from long-distance calls.
The decrease in the revenues from traditional voice services has been
particularly evident in the Japanese market. In this country, the competitive context has
changed following a series of amalgamation operations, among which worthy of
mention is the purchase of the entire share capital of Japan Telecom by Softbank, and
the merger between KDDI and PoweredCom. Following these operations, the Japanese
domestic fixed network services market appears to be dominated by the presence of
three major groups: NTT, Softbank, and KDDI.
In the data transmission segment, there is a continuation of the decrease in the
revenues from traditional data services, countered by the growth of the more innovative
sectors (transmission on IP networks). As a whole, the segment grew by over 16% in
one year.
In particular, the broadband Internet access services grew at a very high pace: in
Japan the growth of broadband connections equalled 21%, for a total of 23 million
connections by year end. The services based on fibre-to-the-home technology registered
an extremely high growth; at the present time such connections account for about 20%
of the total broadband accesses, a percentage that is bound to increase sensibly in the
coming years. In any case, xDSL is the main access technology, with a share of 65% of
the total broadband lines.
As for the other countries of the area, the national markets that registered the
highest growth rates were the Indian and Thai markets. The largest market overall is
China, with 32 broadband connections (a 34% growth in one year). This dimension
opens important prospects for the development of value-added services, such as IPTV.
With regard to this, worthy of mention is the commercial launch by the SMG group of
the first Internet Protocol television service, in Shanghai in late 2005. The television
operator does not have an IP distribution network; therefore the group relied on two
carries, China Telecom and China Netcom, for the supply of the service. SMG provides
the license obtained from the regulatory Authority and its audiovisual content, while the
other two telecommunication operators provide the broadband connectivity services and
bill the end users.
Asia/Pacific, mobile network services
Also with reference to the Asia/Pacific area, the mobile network services market
(Figure 1.12) has registered a significant growth (+9.4%) in the past year, reaching a
total value of 143 billion euro. This trend is the result of the increase of the voice
segment (6.1%) and the strong expansion of the revenues from data services (22.6%).
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