With the trade dispute between the United States and Japan over connection fees charged by NTT Corp. resolved, focus has now shifted to how the nation's telecom giant should be structured in the long term.
Although negotiations lasted until just days before this weekend's Group of Eight summit in Okinawa, a compromise on Japan's part was clearly made easier by the NTT group's announcement in May of its better-than-forecast earnings for fiscal 1999.
NTT had initially insisted that the group could not cut connection fees by 22.5 percent in two years, as the U.S. government was demanding, saying it would force NTT West, which services more rural areas than NTT East, deep into the red.