NTT lost fixed telephone lines in all 47 Japanese prefectures last year. Its competitors gained lines in 21 of them and still finished 84,573 lines down. Japan's Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications published the table on Friday, covering the year to 31 March. NTT is the former state telephone monopoly, privatised in 1985 and renamed NTT, Inc. last July, and its two regional arms still own most of the local access lines in the country. The whole network lost 762,676 lines on the revised basis the ministry now publishes. NTT shed 678,103. Its rivals shed 84,573. Both sides shrank. Two prefectures now sit below half. Mie at 49.3 percent. Nara at 49.4. A year ago Japan's communications ministry named one, Nara at 49.9. Mie is the only prefecture that crossed this year. Its rivals added 4,932 lines while NTT lost 10,473, and both moves pushed the same way. In Nara the rivals lost 3,659 and the share fell regardless. The two prefectures below half arrived by opposite routes. Copper explains all of it. NTT holds what the ministry calls a near monopoly of the metal lines, 92.4 percent of them, and metal fell from 28.3 percent of every line in the country to 25.6 in a single year, so the shrinking of that one category pulls the national share down on its own without anyone switching supplier. Then the figure that turns it around. NTT East's share went up, from 75.4 percent to 75.6. Only NTT West fell. A national decline that reads like competition is one half of one company losing copper in the west. NTT plans to end metal telephone service around 2035 and move customers to fibre or mobile. A line that moves to mobile leaves this count entirely. Japanese law puts a threshold at exactly one half, and crossing it lets the minister designate a carrier for open access rules. Nara crossed a year ago. In March Japan's communications ministry approved NTT's tariff for all 47 prefectures with no carve out.