Japan: one Gigabit/sec for $40 a month

Norie Kuboyama and Tomomi Sekioka:

Softbank, the second-largest provider of high-speed Internet access in Japan, said Monday that Yahoo Japan and Softbank BB would start offering a new optical fiber-based broadband service. Softbank will provide the service at speeds of up to one gigabyte per second and charge users ?4,200, or $38, a month, the company said in a statement.
(Surely this is a typo — the word here has to be Gigabit.)
Softbank and NTT, the nation’s former state monopoly for domestic telephone services, are competing to become Japan’s largest provider of high-speed Internet access . . . NTT last week said that it would cut its basic monthly fee by ?50 in order to compete with Softbank and KDDI, Japan’s second-largest mobile phone company.

Via David Isenberg