How Big Is the Japanese Internet?

by Wm. Auckerman

I'm often asked, "what's the current size of the Japanese Internet?" It's difficult to answer such an question, in part because whatever figure I might give today will be outdated by the time this issue is published -- roughly, the Japanese Internet, both in terms of hosts and registered domains, has been growing at a rate of 10% to 12% per month in 1996 -- and because the inquiry is too vague. "How shall we define 'size'?" is the question I pose in return.

Too often, the inquiry is then rephrased, "How many people are connected to the Internet?" Far from clarifying matters, this makes offering a credible answer even more difficult. Aside from making a vague "guesstimate," surveying Japan's Internet service providers (ISPs) about how many customers they have would be the only way to get an accurate picture of "home" Internet usage. (And even that effort is unlikely to prove accurate, since many ISPs will be leery of giving away "secrets" to their competitors. As an aside, a recent "confidential" industry survey apparently suggests that less than 5% of Japan's ISPs earned a profit on access services last year.)

Then there's the problem of "What's a connection?" Here in the Computing Japan offices, for example, we each have personal PPP accounts, and there are several group accounts as well. If you consider each PPP account to be a connection (and many people do), then from that viewpoint Computing Japan alone accounts for more than two dozen "connections" to the Japanese Internet. (And I personally have three PPP accounts, on two different ISPs; so, do I count as one, two, or three connections?)

Many of these PPP accounts connect via the office LAN to our Web server, however, so it could be argued that these all represent just a single Internet connection. Or, taking it even further, since the office Web server connects to our ISP via a dial-up ISDN line, not a leased line, in the strictest sense we aren't really "connected" to the Internet at all.

Which doesn't bring us any closer to answering the fundamental question.

Connected domains

The easiest way to judge the size of Japan's Internet is to count registered domain names. As of August 1, 1996, according to JPNIC records, there were 10,025 allocated Japanese Internet domains, of which 7,480 (75%) were actually connected. (Many companies apply for a domain name even though they have no current plans to use it in order to prevent another company or individual from co-opting that name.)

Those 7,480 connected Japanese domains represent a 13.5% increase in one month (from 6,586 on July 1), and a more than 3-fold increase in the past year (from just 2,477 on August 1, 1995). The three largest categories of connected domains were corporate (63%), organizational (18%), and academic (10%).

By prefecture, Tokyo is the clear focus of the Japanese Internet (as it is almost everything else in Japan). Nearly 48% of all connected domains (and 57% of the .CO domains) are allocated to Tokyo -- based on the postal code of the registered address -- followed by Osaka with 8%, Kanagawa (Yokohama) with 7%, Aichi (Nagoya) with 4%, and Fukuoka with 3%.

Connected host systems

Another way to judge the size of the Japanese Internet is by the number of connected host systems. As of June 2, 1996, there were 455,747 Internet hosts (direct connections only; dial-up connections like ours are not included in this count). This was an increase of nearly 66% in six months (275,001 on January 1, 1996), and a growth of some 186% since June 1995.

In terms of host connections, Japan ranked 6th in the world at the start of 1996, behind the US, Germany, UK, Canada, and Australia. Mid-year rankings were not in at press time, and I couldn't come up with accurate figures for the other global leaders, but it seems probable that Japan will have broken into the top five.

So, how big is the Japanese Internet? Pretty darn big, and still growing fast.ç