ates to customer premises using a hybrid fibre-copper topology. Case Study 9.1: Yahoo Broadband Yahoo Broadband (BB) is a joint venture company between Yahoo! Inc. and Softbank K.K. a software development company (and an early investor in Yahoo). Yahoo Japan, also a joint venture of Yahoo! Inc. and Softbank K.K., is an e-commerce company which offers services including search engines, auctions, news portals and SO on. Yahoo BB offers broadband ADSL and more recently optical fibre to the home services in Japan. It started its services in September of 2001 and successfully grew to become one of the largest internet service providers (ISPs) in the Japanese market. The internet service market in Japan was small compared with many OECD countries such as the United States. One reason was the comparatively lower personal computer Broadband Telecommunications Technologies and Management ownership by Japanese households due to small size apartments. However, with the growth in popularity of mobile internet through services such as i-Mode, and global growth of the World Wide Web, internet connectivity from the home became more and more necessary. The deregulation of the telecommunication industry had started in the mid-1980s with the partial privatisation of the incumbent national operator NTT. In 1996 further legislation was put in place to promote competition in the long-distance telephony market. A number of ISPs appeared in the Japanese market, including Tokyo Metallic and eAccess and soon flat-rate 64 kbps ISDN data services were offered by NTT at the cost of around $80 per month. Faster DSL services were offered at a range of rates of up to $350 per month with 1.6 Mbps downstream and 288 kbps upstream transmission rates. Despite these, the take up of ADSL services in Japan was quite slow due to the small market size of households with PCs, low recognition of the value of the services broad- band could offer and the relative high prices for these services. Moreover, the cost of ADSL modems was relatively high and in t