NTT Communications Corp., a major long-distance and international telecom carrier, announced Thursday it will enter the local-call market on May 1.

The company, a unit of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., will begin offering local-call services in Tokyo, Osaka and Aichi prefectures at a daytime rate of 8.8 yen for three minutes, the same as those of NTT East Corp. and NTT West Corp., NTT's two regional carriers, and KDDI, it said.

The move means that NTT Communications will be competing with the two other NTT group firms ahead of the May launch of a new service called Myline, which will allow users in Japan to connect to their preferred carriers without dialing prefix numbers.

Under the NTT Law, NTT East and NTT West are limited to offering phone services within prefectural boundaries. NTT Communications, however, is not subject to that restriction.

From March 1, NTT Communications will also lower its daytime long-distance rates for calls between areas that are 60 km to 100 km apart by between 10 yen and 60 yen for three minutes, the same rate offered by KDDI and Japan Telecom Co., it said.

The cut is in addition to the one it announced Jan. 22 that will slash charges on calls between prefectures by an average of 21 percent from March 1.

Wider ADSL coverage

NTT East Corp. plans to extend the reach of its asymmetrical digital subscriber line service, a high-speed Internet connection technology, to cover 80 percent of potential subscribers by the end of March 2002, company sources said Thursday.

The move marks a major shift in strategy for the regional carrier of NTT Corp., which had been focused on marketing its integrated services digital network technology.

NTT West Corp., the other regional arm, is expected to follow suit, industry analysts said.

Although ADSL uses existing telephone lines as NTT's ISDN service does, it offers transmission speeds of up to 1.5 megabits per second compared to 64 kilobits per second for ISDN.

At present, NTT has more than 10 million ISDN subscribers.

The telecom giant's subscribers have been calling on the two carriers in increasing numbers to offer ADSL services in wider areas as ADSL ventures continue to pop up across the country.

The move by NTT East and West will enable subscribers in outlying cities to easily exchange video clips via the Internet and help advance the government's plan to have 30 million of the nation's 43 million households wired up to high-speed Internet connections within five years, the analysts said.

The two regional carriers had originally planned to provide ADSL in prefectural capitals by the end of June, but most urban areas can now expect to have service by the end of the next fiscal year.

The carriers have already provided ADSL service in certain parts of the Tokyo and Osaka areas at a monthly subscription fee of 4,500 yen.

In Tokyo's 23 wards, NTT East has already accepted 25,000 applications for the service and receives 1,000 applications a day, it said.