ffering advanced services for business customers, a venture in which it has performed very badly. Equant is a relatively new carrier offer- ing traditional and advanced telecom services to business customers, but it is controlled by France Telecom, which owns 54 percent of its stock. It too has lost about 95 percent of its market capitalization in the past three years. Japan Like most other developed countries, Japan has begun to privatize its national telecommunications carrier, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph Corporation (NTT), and has opened its telecommunications markets to competition. The process started in 1985, and then in 1996 NTT, the incumbent carrier, was asked to restructure itself into a holding company with a separate long-distance division and two local operating companies, NTT East and NTT West. By March 2002, the new entrants, or new com- mon carriers, had obtained 25 to 28 percent of the long-distance market but only 20 percent of the local market. 24 In December 2000, the Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications introduced a network unbundling require- ment in Japan, allowing new entrants to offer DSL services over shared NTT lines. At that time, Japan had fewer than 1 million broadband sub- scribers, most of them using cable modem service. Since that time, DSL has grown rapidly, attracting 11.5 million subscribers by March 2004, while cable modems had grown to just 2.6 million lines and fiber to the home had increased to 1.2 million lines. By March 2004, the new entrants had accounted for nearly 62.5 percent of Japanese DSL subscriber lines, thanks largely to aggressive price compe- tition from Yahoo-Broadband (Yahoo BB), which is offering DSL for as lit- tle as ¥2,280 (about $20) a month, not including the cost of the modem. 26 In its first year, Yahoo BB had more than 1 million subscriber lines, and by March 2004, it had increased its subscribers to 4.28 million using lines shared with NTT.²7 Yahoo BB is a subsidiary of Softbank, which provides the financing 