Sadahiro Sato, GM of BB Phone Service Division of Softbank, gave a very informative presentation. You can find the backbone of Yahoo! BB in Japan and they have acquired Japan Telecom last year really for their backbone network across Japan.

And since Yahoo! BB has 22% of the telephony market share in Japan, nearly 33% of their revenue comes from voice termination from the other telco. (so they want to do well but not too much to kill off all their competitors :-)

The network protocol is a mixature of MGCP, H.323 and SIP but he talks about moving all to SIP eventually (yeah!). And watch out for Yahoo! BB offering WiFi phone services, particularly, he mentioned about a WiFi+CDMA phones. He also asked the audience to talk to their government to give Yahoo! a mobile license :-)

Some other interesting note: Yahoo! BB has 4.4M subscribers now and 95% of the Yahoo! BB subscribers took up BB Phone services. And yes, it is finally confirmed: Yahoo! BB TA (terminal adaptor) redirect all the emergency calls, toll-free calls, etc etc (ie, all the money losing calls) and fall back to the NTT. Haha, no wonder NTT is pissed!

ps: I am blogging this on stage.

While I am away in Japan, back home, Singapore Press Holding turned their ST Interactive into a paid service. (via MrBrown).

Heck, who cares!?

Obviously I don’t read ST Interactive; In fact, I seldom even read their printed Straits Time. The fact I got this news via MrBrown blog is a good indication how much their site matters to me.

Few years ago, they screwed up my pobox (aka PostOne) by turning it into a paid service. Obviously they never learn their lesson and they still don’t understand the online culture…

[Okay, maybe I feel a little bit of regret – I help them setup AsiaOne many years ago…in fact, AsiaOne is the second news paper online after NYT and I hate to see them fail. *sigh*]

Reported on Nikkeibp (Sorry, Japanese only):

アジア太平洋地区におけるENUMの普及団体APEET（Asia Pacific ENUM Engineering Team）が，国内初となる公開通話デモンストレーションを実施している。2月21日から25日にかけて京都で開催中のインターネット基盤技術のアジア太平洋国際会議「APRICOT2005」の会場内で，参加者同士が自由に体験できる。実験の責任者である日本レジストリサービス（JPRS） 技術研究部の米谷嘉朗部長代理によると，「ENUMの実験を国内で一般公開するのは初めて」だという。

(my bad translation: APEET conducted the first telephony trial in Japan. Participants at APRICOT 2005 can experience the new technology and make calls freely among themselves from 21st to 25th. Yoneya-san @ JPRS “This is the first public ENUM trial in Japan.”)

The surprisingly part is how fast this made onto the news. Hotta-san and Yoneya-san sat down with the reporters at 5:30pm after the Internet Telephony track and we saw the report at 9:00pm.

Couldn’t sleep and woke up at 6am. Went downstair to do my emails, met Toru Takahashi and went breakfast with him. Found out from him that one of his company is going IPO…again. To be exact, third time now. Remember, the last time I met him in Korea a year ago, same thing happened. Dunno it is me or what but congz to him :-)

Then spend the whole day chairing the Internet Telephony track at APRICOT. Richard already blogged about it so I won’t repeat here.

Went to lunch with Dave Crocker who is trying to explain CSV (smtp authentication and accreditation) idea to me on antispam. Neat idea.

The highlight of the day must be APEET dinner. JPRS managed to find a very nice Japanese restaurant – a bit out of the way but great ambience, excellent Japanese food. Most of all, all of us enjoyed ourselves; I lost track how much I drank but I think I managed to make it back to the hotel on foot…

Just discovered that Yahoo! BB just got a /8 (formerly known as Class A) IP address allocation 126.0.0.0/8 from APNIC on 8th Feb 2005. /8 in layman terms is equivalent to over 16M IP addresses – one of the largest IP allocation block we have seen. Wow!

[In case it is still not obvious, all my travel entries are really for my wife (and my boss) who wants to know what I have been up to.]

Started early and have breakfast with Marc Blanchet, the former co-chair of IDN WG with me. Anyway, Marc is back doing IPv6 and his small startup in Canada is doing great – expanding their business in Asia.

The spend most of the day at the APRICOT AC meeting, listening to the various presentation from the bidders of APRICOT 2007. All of them are interesting and it is a difficult decision (no leak here, of cos).

Then I went over to the APDIP Internet Governance; I hope I didn’t say anything stupid or gets into trouble for what I said. I suppose it is always a possibility and someone somewhere isn’t happy with what I say.

Immediately, after the APDIP panel, I have to rush to the APEET BoF. The trial we were doing got so much interests that many people have been asking us to do a BoF to talk about how we did it, how it works, what else can they do with the phones and the ENUM service we provide.

Following the APEET BoF is the Internationalized Email BoF – The meeting run all the way into the night and we finally end at 9pm…

I was at a panel on Internet Governance organized by APDIP. The show goes to Geoff Hutson, who gave the most eloquent impromptu speech¹ I have heard. Unfortunate for me, I didn’t really prepared much before I was up on the panel; Instead, I was busy scribbling some talking points while the other speakers takes their turn.

Anyway, I was speaking about the definitions of Internet Governance : that so far, all the proposed made are either too engineering-centric or too political-centric, the first is not easily understood and the latter has a habit of saying a lot about nothing. And there is a debate if it there is any sense to talk about the “governance” since Internet is more about “coordination”. But regardless of the choice of words, everyone wants a piece of the action.

Particularly, there is also a percepted “center of power” in US – percepted but because the reality is that the real “power” is distributed across the Net among various groups who are collobrating and working together. For example, it isn’t clear who “control” IP address allocation to the end-users: is it ICANN, IANA, RIRs or ISPs? The reality is that all of them are and neither of them is.

Very often, I was also asked if I am for ICANN or am I for ITU; First, a wrong question because it isn’t a war between ICANN and ITU – both their function in the governance/coordination of Internet – and Internet Governance is bigger then ICANN. My position on Internet Governance is that it covers any issues which relates to proper function of Internet but it does not mean we need government regulation on all of them.

Speaking of government, there is also a general concern that government or regulation are bad. Yes, we should reject bad regulation – regulation that tries to protect certain groups or monopolies, regulation that hurts competitions and discourage innovation – but we should embrace regulations that remove impendence to adoption of new technology, that encourage competitions etc. Likewise, for government involvement – the question is how to we direct them to doing good things and less of trying to fix things that does not need to be fixed.

¹ I believe transcript will be available later.

Have breakfast at Suguru Yamaguchi. I know him when he is still a “young” professor many years ago but now, he is the IT Security Advisor to the Japan Cabinet and Prime Minister. Wow very important person now! Anyway, have a little discussion with him on privacy and asked him to hook up with Joi.

Gave out SIP phones in the morning and wandering excitably around the hall talking to people about their phones. In fact, we run out of phones by noon time, and APRICOT haven’t even started. Another great news is we got US (thanks Jeff and Libretel) and SE (thanks to Jakob) gateway up in addition to CN, TW and SG. We got so much interest that we going to do an impromptu BoF tomorrow.

Got Joi to speak about blogging at APNG (phew, wiggled out of that :-) and really enjoy his talk!

Banged into Steve Crocker and have lunch with him. Then Toru Takahashi, Randy Bush and Geoff Hutson joined us. While Steve is showing me his file collobration tool, Randy is knocking me to get the SIP phone working with his Asterisk.

Just finish listening to Jun Murai keynote and sitting at APNG to get a bit of peace and quiet…Need to spend the next few hours doing my keynote on Thrusday on VoIP.

Oh yea, the famous Bert was spotted in APRICOT. But I think he spent too much time in the toilet. ha ha!

This is an exciting day for me. We are giving out Hitachi WiFi SIP Phones at APRICOT 2005. This is part of the APEET ENUM/SIP Live Trial we have been putting together for the last few months. Every wifi phones are assigned with a SIP address which also comes with an ENUM¹ number and this allows APRICOT delegates to call each another. Additionally, we also put up PSTN gateways in China, Taiwan and Singapore (US pending) so these phones can also be used to call back to PSTN phones in these countries (free of cos).

We also pre-registered every APRICOT delegates with a SIP account and ENUM numbers which they can used with their softphones with instructions on how to set it up. There is also an ENUM registration system where they could use it to configure the ENUM to associate it with their webpage, emails etc etc. ENUM client is also provided, of cos.

This is so cool to see people queuing up and asking questions about their new phones. It is also fun to see people excitingly calling each another as if they never made a phone call in their life. Most are just impressed that it just works! (out of the box, battery included ;-)

There is also a booth setup where we explained to people how we setup the system and we have some SIP phones on display. Particularly of interest is this phone from Panasonic which comes with ENUM resolution built-in!

Thanks to APEET members who are still hard at work yesterday trying to get things setup. Keep your fingers cross and I hope we survive this week :-)

¹ Technically, it isn’t ENUM because we are not using e164.arpa. The numbers we gave out is assigned from apenum.org, ie. 8.8.8.apenum.org.

² Disclosal: I am the chair for APEET. But we are not-for-profit and doing this really to promote awareness of the technology (beside the learning experience). In fact, we did the whole thing with zero budget, thanks to all the sponsors :-)