The telephone subscription right (officially: facility installation contribution) is a one-time fee paid to establish a new NTT landline connection. Once priced at 72,000 yen (before tax), it was recorded as an intangible fixed asset on corporate balance sheets and could even be sold or pledged as collateral. During the bubble era, rights traded for over 100,000 yen each, holding genuine asset value as "telephone bonds."
The history of telephone subscription rights is closely tied to Japan's telecommunications infrastructure development. In the postwar telephone network expansion era, NTT (then Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Public Corporation) collected these fees from subscribers as a source of capital investment. In an era when applying for a phone meant waiting years, the subscription right served as an "admission ticket" to get a phone line. The system was maintained after NTT's privatization in 1985, with a cumulative total of approximately 5 trillion yen collected in facility installation contributions.
In 2005, the facility installation contribution was halved to 36,000 yen (before tax), and a "Light Plan" was introduced simultaneously (275 yen higher monthly fee but no installation contribution). With the rapid decline in landline demand due to mobile phone proliferation, the market value of telephone subscription rights has fallen to just a few thousand yen. Many remain on corporate financial statements at their original acquisition cost (72,000 or 36,000 yen) without impairment, sometimes flagged as "hidden unrealized losses."
NTT has considered abolishing telephone subscription rights, but the compensation issue for approximately 20 million existing rights holders remains unresolved. If abolished, demands for refunds of previously paid contributions could arise, but NTT's position is that "facility installation contributions have already been used for telephone network construction and maintenance and are not subject to refund." The treatment of subscription rights has not changed even after the PSTN-to-IP migration, and rights are maintained even when switching to Hikari Denwa. See Phone Number Structure for the landline numbering system and History of Phone Number Digit Lengths for infrastructure evolution.