petitiveness and making international contribution.

While ubiquitous networks hold enormous possibilities, expansion of networks may also present new problems such as privacy infringement. According to a survey on the intention of using the services and systems realized by ubiquitous networks, the top concern held against ubiquitous networks was “leakage of personal information,” indicated by an outstanding proportion, 81.5%, followed by “credibility of the networks” indicated by 52.2%. This indicates that concerns about privacy and information security need to be wiped out in order for ubiquitous networks to be accepted by society.

## (2) Burgeoning of next-generation networks

Ubiquitous networks are expected to make dramatic progress until 2005 or 2010, but some burgeoning examples, such as home networks, high-speed wireless access services at "hot spots," and navigational services have already started to penetrate in society.

Due to the trend of owning multiple PCs at home and the diffusion of broadband, more people have come to establish home networks (home LANs) that join the PCs at home either by wire or wireless connection. At the end of 2002, 25.7% of all households owned multiple PCs, and 35.5% of them had home networks. The installation rate of such home networks was 53.1% for broadband user households while it was 33.2% for narrowband user households, suggesting that many users established home networks when they subscribed to broadband services.

In addition, provision of high-speed Internet connection services using wireless LANs is making progress in facilities such as hotels and restaurants and public spaces such as airports and railway stations (these are called “hot spots”) to enable out-of-home, high-speed Internet access. In 2002, 8.8% of Internet users used wireless access services at hot spots.

Furthermore, the diffusion of out-of-home Internet access means and global positioning systems (GPS) have given rise to navigational services, which are services accessible anywhere that provide positional information and information on the neighborhood of the current position to give geographical directions for people and cars. Representative navigational services are the positional information services on cell phones as well as the telematics services. “Telematics,” which is a term that combines telecommunications and infomatics, is a next-generation information service for cars. Car navigation systems have already become widely diffused, used by 23.8%—nearly a quarter—of all households as of the end of 2002.

## (3) Outlook for intelligent home appliances

Provision of intelligent home appliances is now shifting from an experimental phase to a phase of practical application. When intelligent home appliances become available, the individually used home appliances will be connected to each other by networks, and by further connecting them to the Internet through gateways, it will be possible to operate the home appliances from outside and provide network services linked with hardware. For example, it will be possible to provide maintenance services, such as upgrading the software or failure diagnosis of intelligent home appliances, and to provide such data as cooking recipes and television program information for automatic video recording.

As of the end of 2002, households owning Internet-supported television sets were only 3.0% and those that owned other home appliances that could be connected to the Internet were 3.2%, indicating that the full-fledged diffusion of intelligent home appliances has yet to start ("Communications Usage Trend Survey in 2002," MPHPT).

According to a survey on conditions for using intelligent home appliances, most respondents answered that they would “want to purchase if the intelligent home appliances were sold at the same prices as general home appliances” or “want to purchase if the price difference was within an additional 10%.”

In addition, questions on the priority conditions for using intelligent home appliances showed the result that it is necessary to eliminate people’s concerns about being linked with networks and to secure easy operations in order to diffuse intelligent home appliances.

## (4) Wide utilization of wireless tags

A wireless tag is a tag consisting of an IC chip and an antenna, which allows the reading and writing of the identification data stored in the IC chip without touching by use of radio technology. Tags that do not have their own power source are processed by using the electric power of radio waves emitted from the network device, and the process results are transmitted by radio.

One example of widely used wireless tags is “Suica” issued by East Japan Railway Company as a traffic card for automatic ticket gates. The Suica service was launched in November 2001, and the number of users exceeded 6 million persons by April 2003. Wireless tags are also used in ID cards for managing entrance/exit to and from offices and at production sites, and the shipment values of wireless tags are increasing.

Wireless tags are expected to be applied to more extensive fields in the future, but attachment/management of numbers on wireless tags, lowering of unit costs, and the ensuring of privacy and information security have been pointed out as problems to be tackled.

## (5) Shift to IPv6

As ubiquitous networks make progress, access termi-