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Forest LINTON Japan's Internet is Hopping!The latest InterNIC surveyEvery six months, Network Wizards takes an Internet-wide survey on behalf of INTERNIC (the body that governs Internet domain names). Although a rough survey at best, it provides a moderate guess at the size and growth of the Internet -- or, more specifically, the number of hosts (servers) in the various worldwide domains. The most recent survey, July '96, indicates the number of hosts in Japan has grown by over 84% in just six months. This is a huge jump, even bigger than the impressive 65% growth rate recorded in last January's survey. Japan's growth rate surpasses not only the overall growth of the Internet, but the growth of the other ten largest countries as well. It is also important to note that Japan has moved up from 6th to 4th place in terms of number of Internet hosts. The effects of the recent Internet boom are clearly showing up in the survey. Perhaps my earlier prediction that Japan will capture the #2 spot may come true after all -- if only a year late. Number of Internet users in Japan Like the magazine's editors [see "How Big Is the Japanese Internet," September, page 29], I am often asked, "How many Internet users are there in Japan?" This is a very hard number to calculate (impossible, in fact), but with a little bit of logic and some luck, I think we can make an accurate guess. What I will try and do is establish a minimum number. According to JPNIC (Japan Internetwork Center), in August '96 there were 10,025 registered Japanese subdomains. Of that, about 7,500 have been connected. The co.jp (company) domains numbered 4,750 (around 63% of the total), and ac.jp (academic) domains numbered 710 (or about 10%). If we apply this ratio to the total number of servers in Japan (496,427), we get approximately 313,000 corporate servers and 50,000 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 connected subdomains (25%) may help us guess this number. Let's say, for argument's sake, that only 75% of the above servers are operating. Now, we simply need to guess the average number of users per server, which is a lot harder than it sounds. We can probably 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) may not provide call-out Internet access at all; academic hosts probably serve more users on average than corporate hosts; and some users are connecting from multiple locations. I believe we can conservatively estimate an average of 5 users per corporate server and 10 users per academic server. That puts us right around 1.5 million users. Lastly, there are now over 250 Internet service providers (ISPs) in Japan. These range in size from the very big (Bekkoame has over 40,000 subscribers) to the very small (some local providers have fewer than a couple hundred). For simplicity, let's say that there are an average of 1,000 users per ISP. Add that to the above leased-line users, and we have about 1.75 million. The real trick comes when defining an "Internet user." It is much easier to guess at the number of people with Internet access than to tell who is actually using the Internet. My "official" estimate is that between 1.5 and 2 million Japanese people have Internet access. I doubt if we will ever get an accurate number of users in the near future. (For the above exercise, I have ignored the approximately 1.5 million NIFTY-Serve and 1 million PC-VAN users. If we count them, and users of all the small BBS and other services, then subtract some for duplicate accounts, I would guess that over 4 million people in Japan are online.) Have your own guess? Drop me a note at forest@gol.com. There really are Net surfers in Japan Here is a tidbit that is both telling and amusing. The residence of the Japanese Prime Minister has had a homepage on the Web since April of 1995. It received some attention when first launched, but then settled down to about 25,000 hits (page accesses) per month. A testament to booming Internet growth in Japan, the Prime Minister's page is now getting over 2 million hits a month. Reports have it that quite a vocal crowd is accessing his page and sending Prime Minister Hashimoto comments and complaints on topics ranging from the handling of O-157 food poisoning to Hashimoto's slicked-back hairstyle. The Prime Minister's Residence homepage is at http://www.kantei.go.jp/. Forest Linton is living, learning, and working hard at Koyosha Graphics in Tokyo, Japan. You'll find links to his Japan Web Guide and The Digital Forest at http://www. cjmag.co.jp/magazine/bios.
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