Japan’s state-backed telecoms powerhouse Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp (NTT) said yesterday that the number of people signed up to its FLET's Hikari fibre-optic internet access service has now topped ten million subscribers. Launched in August 2001, the service offers download speeds of up to 100Mbps. As of 14 September, NTT’s regional divisions NTT East and NTT West had 5.653 million and 4.348 million FLET’s Hikari subscribers respectively. NTT took five years to reach the five million subscriber milestone but just 22 months to double that to ten million. NTT hopes to hit 20 million fibre-optic subscribers by March 2011 and said it also had 5,100 people contracted on its next generation network (NGN) service, launched in March this year in parts of Tokyo and Osaka.

Source:telegeography