Coming from a man who used to boast of having a 300-year business plan, that's saying a lot. But Masayoshi Son isn't exaggerating. His latest master plan includes nothing less than the demolition of Japan's telecom industry, and, not incidentally, the revival of his moribund company, Softbank. To get there, he's hawking next-generation, superfast, supercheap DSL to the Japanese masses.
He may no longer be the world's eighth-richest man - Softbank's stock price is down 98 percent from its bubble peak - but Son still moves with an impressive entourage. A cadre of yes-men, crowded around him in a Tokyo conference room, nod anxiously as their diminutive, balding maestro tries to sell me on Softbank's improbable makeover from venture capital washout to broadband pioneer. "We are the first service to have a pure IP-based network," crows Son, his placid face betraying an I-told-you-so smirk. "It is more powerful than anything else that exists around the world."
Softbank has spent close to $2 billion building out a gigabit Ethernet network and leasing copper wire from Japanese telecom giant Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. The result is a service, offered under the Yahoo! BB brand, that provides Internet access to Japanese homes at 12 megabits per second - eight times faster than what Americans are used to - for about $21 a month. Every day, as many as 7,000 new subscribers fire up their plug-and-play DSL modems, making Yahoo! BB the world's fastest-growing broadband service.
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