“Losing FTTH means losing everything, I think,” Hiromichi Shinohara, director of Access Network Service System Labs for Japanese carrier NTT, told the crowd at the Fiber-to-the-Home Conference in Las Vegas this morning. He was explaining the importance of FTTH in fending off competitors, and he didn’t mince words.

NTT is feeling perhaps even more pressure to deploy fiber than U.S. telcos, and NTT is responding to that pressure with strong action. The Japanese firm expects to have more than 6 million fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) subscribers by March. Verizon Communications, for example, doesn’t expect to have that many FTTP subscribers until 2010. (This year, Verizon will only pass 6 million homes.) And by the time Verizon has 6 million FTTP subscribers, NTT expects to have 30 million.

This is just a frame of reference with which to appreciate NTT’s undertaking, however. It’s not quite fair to compare the two carriers’ progress, as they operate within vastly different cultures and levels of teledensity. But along the way, NTT is following a learning curve similar to the one Verizon described last week. With 20,000 new subscribers signing up for fiber with NTT East each week, new customers sometimes wait weeks or even months to receive the service they ordered. NTT has also struggled with in-house wiring and delays incurred while storing and splicing extra fiber in cabinets. Meanwhile, NTT has learned how to not only offer various tiers of FTTP service for different economic demographics, it has learned how to up-sell customers of its lower-tier service to higher versions using cool applications and IP phones.

NTT is aggressively blazing a trail of fiber to residential consumers, acting with the kind of urgency you’d expect from a company that believes it has a lot to gain and a lot more to lose.

E-mail me at egubbins@prismb2b.com.