The companies will form a joint venture to provide digital subscriber lines (DSL) that link Japanese households with the use of conventional telephone lines, the US company said in a press release.
The new service can handle data ten times as fast as ISDN and charge a fixed monthly fee of 5,000 yen (US$47.6).
The US government is urging Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp to lower local access fees it charges other telecommunications companies to make it easier for them to start businesses in Japan.
As an indication of how popular the Internet has become in Japan, the most popular domain name suffix after the American ".com," ".net" and ".org" is Japan's ".jp"--even though URLs don't accommodate Japanese characters.
The number of Japanese Internet users is forecast to rise to 76.7 million in 2005 from 27.1 million as of the end of last year, according to the White Paper released by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.
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