世論 What Japan Thinks

A recent survey from goo Research looked at internet telephony, or VoIP, and the report on japan.internet.com focused on a pair of questions about Skype.

Demographics

Between the 13th and 16th of June 2011 1,091 members of the goo Research monitor group completed a private internet-based questionnaire. 52.7% of the sample were male, 16.2% in their teens, 18.2% in their twenties, 21.4% in their thirties, 16.4% in their forties, 15.4% in their fifties, and 12.4% aged sixty or older.

I’m surprised with the high percentage using Skype on their smartphones; I wonder what the pattern of usage is? Do people leave it always loaded as a replacement for the phone, or do they just load it up for specific calls, or do they send an email to tell the other end to load up the program? Perhaps one day I’ll find a report on that…
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japan.internet.com recently published the results of a survey conducted by JR Tokai Express Research into the use of IP phones.

Demographics

330 members of JR Tokai Express Research online monitor group employed in the private or public sector completed a private survey conducted on the 21st of April 2007. 62.4% were male, 15.8% in their twenties, 49.4% in their thirties, 26.7% in their forties, 6.7% in their fifties, and 1.5% in their sixties.

The main promoter of IP phones (and the biggest provider of “free” wireless connections in Japan, but that’s another story!) is Yahoo! BB, who can often be found in front of railway stations and the like thrusting ADSL routers into the hands of unsuspecting passers-by for them to use as both internet connection ports and as telephones. Their service allows free calls to other Yahoo! BB users, and almost all standard phones can just plug straight into their routers.
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japan.internet.com, in conjunction with goo Research, looked at the use of Skype in Japan. They interviewed 1,011 people from their research monitor group by means of an internet-based questionnaire. 41.6% of the sample was male, 24.3% were in their twenties, 43.2% in their thirties, 25.4% in their forties, and 7.0% in their fifties.

Skype has been somewhat heavily promoted in Japan, with Livedoor being the main partner, and various hardware is available such as cordless phones or adapters for standard phone lines. However, with Google, Yahoo!, MSN and others offering free PC to PC VoIP service, and with the launch recently of a free IP telephony service in Japan called freep, the marketplace is getting rather crowded.

For those of you interested in learning Japanese, Tae Kim occassionally holds Skype-based language lessons.
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ITMedia reported that Push To Talk, the new service being geared up for launch right now by DoCoMo in their new 902i range, is still completely unknown to almost four in five mobile phone users. Push To Talk is a walkie-talkie-like service, just press the button and talk, sending your voice over the IP network, so it is VoIP rather than a traditional call. However, their pricing is currently set to a rather high 5 yen per push, or a more reasonable 1,000 yen per month for unlimited access. But, as we will see later, less than a quarter of mobile phone users spend more than three minutes per day talking, and only just over a tenth feel they don’t talk enough.

Infoplant just released a survey (not yet available on their web site – it seems to have been done for “Keitai Best” magazine) carried out at the end of October amongst just 400 internet users (200 of each sex) aged 15 and above who owned mobile phones. (Presumably they used their internet monitor group and chose a demographically accurate cross-section, so the figures can be trusted.)

First, regarding Push To Talk, not even 10% were familiar with the features of the service, and just under 80% had not even heard of the term. However, when the main features were explained, about 60% said they would like to use it, with the number of women wanting to use it being 9 percentage points higher.

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