So when the company launched i-mode in 1999, it already had 23 million customers. And clever marketing made the transition to i-mode cheap and simple. The offer was too good to refuse. Traditional telephone systems open up a dedicated channel between two people, or two computers. This is wasteful because even in normal conversations, there's a lot of silence between the words.
Packet switching is more efficient because many conversations can be carried on a single channel.
Anything you say or type is broken up into data packets, each of which bears the address of its destination. The phone network directs these packets, by any free routes, to their destination where they are reassembled. There's no waiting for the modem to dial in and connect you to the Net. You choose a site from a menu and it appears almost instantaneously. Downloading from some sites can still take a while, though.