"If the outcome of the 2008 election doesn't get me to move to another country"

By far the dumbest shit i have heard today. What can either candidate do? Will the Messiah swoop down from his golden chariot and lay fiber coast to coast?

The problem is the fat ignorant lazy and uneducated American consumer who doesnt demand more for their $$$. Oh and please for the sake of god dont start with the BS that the govt should provide Hi-speed internet. A govt ISP would have the efficency of the postal service and the compassion of the IRS.

Govt isnt the solution it's the problem. Can anyone give an example of how the govt would make hi-speed access equal to the japanese wthout raising rates, taxes or utter fucking things over?

Nastro

All of a sudden my 50Mbs doesn't seem quite as awesome. :-/

wooties

Even though I'm a Japanese-American, all my relatives call me "AOL" whenever I visit family back home. Now I know why =/

discounteggroll

Meanwhile, in the US, our goal is 10 Mbps by 2010 and 100 Mbps by 2015. During the cold war when we were all on top of the world (or so it seemed) with out technology, it wasn't because we let the invisible hand of the free market, what we so desperately defended from the commies, work- it was because the government pushed for and funded developments. Without that we've fallen far behind in many areas and we need to get our asses in gear and have some government-funded research going on into new technologies that will benefit the private sector.

mhlaxp

When did this country start sucking so much?

Failing at Space, failing at Global politics, failing at internet access apparently.

Uhg.

Alchemistmerlin

This is very unfair

Avizzv92

WTH is US waiting for? At this rate, it will look like we run dial up. Wait, it does seem like that. I can't believe US classify 756kb and up as broadband.

UltimateIdiot

OMG i want to move to Japan sooooo badly, better start learning Japanese.

The-Joker

Now why can't we have that here at my university? Then they wouldn't have to use packet filtering.

bagellord

@newdeepdan: "Housing is in Japan, I want to do a lot of my Japanese." according to Google Translate.

Dakota Courtois

@Nastro: I didn't say government-provided service, I said government-funded research. You want the public to demand it? Here I am, a taxpayer, demanding it. The "let the free market do it" attitude has failed us in this instance and many others- don't know if you've noticed, but that's why our economy just imploded and we're behind in so many technologies.

Our failure in the broadband area has lead to H.Res.1292 and S.Res.191, which set goals of universal connection speeds at 10 Mbps by 2010 and 100 Mbps by 2015. This is a start but it still leaves us woefully behind the rest of the world. Read more here.

The fact is it is very unlikely that we'll be even with the rest of the world within 20 years, and if we want to continue calling ourselves the greatest nation then we have to act, not continue the same plan that's had our country in a dive for nearly 8 years now.

mhlaxp

@newdeepdan: ???

bagellord

@Nastro:

I believe you grossly misunderstood the statement you are quoting.

He was saying "Depending on how the election goes, I may move out of the US, however if I DON'T move out of the US because of the election, I may move out just for awesomely fast internet access."

I'm sorry, did I break your soapbox?

Alchemistmerlin

私は日本に住したいですが私の日本語をよくありません。 heehee.

newdeepdan

@mhlaxp:

Want faster access then let the public demand it. The tech is out and it can be done. However, the govt shouldnt be the one to give us access. let the free market do that.

Nastro

@Nastro: Maybe we could invade Japan and steal their internets and bring them back home for us to use.

wait. Japan has robots. nevermind.

wooties

I'm living in japan and i have a 100Mbps and its freaking fast! I can only imagine what a 1Gbps would be.

yasudevil

@oyanobaka: I meant "say". Sorry, it's almost 1:30 am here.

oyanobaka

@bagellord: I think what newdeepdan is trying to day is that he wants to live in Japan, but his Japanese isn't good.

oyanobaka

WTF. Japan's ISP's making things faster, Comcast making ours SLOWER.

johnnyabnormal

Looks like I might be switching to KDDI, although a friend did get email them when he was using bit torrent to much... not that I would.
@newdeepdan: did you just use bable fish for that Japanese?

oyanobaka

@Alchemistmerlin: Mccain hasn't turn on a computer in 20 years, I bet he will give you 100Gbps by forcing companies to get with the times.

Hopefully you won't cap your service after a couple seconds...

VakeroRokero

@Nastro: Soooo... what have you done to make yourself NOT a "fat ignorant lazy and uneducated American consumer" in regards to this issue?

And actually, the USPS is INCREDIBLY efficient, where have you been?

KStrike155

@Barry99705: Man, screw that. We shouldn't have to complain!!! ISP's in the USA obviously don't give a shit about us. They just want us to pay more for less.

johnnyabnormal

That's true. They already paid for everything with their much higher living standards. Night of stay at their motel can pay for a weekend stay at a 5 stars hotel here in the US. Naturally, you get what you pay for.

@Nastro: Can anyone give an example of how the govt would make hi-speed access equal to the japanese wthout raising rates, taxes or utter fucking things over?

Heman

@oyanobaka: Yeap and apparently is worst than I thought.

newdeepdan

Okay, this is for the smart people. Who should we complain to? At&t? Comcrap? Verizon? Road Runner? For the most part, the fiber is already there, why aren't they using it? AFAIK the only one doing fiber to the door is Verizon, and even they aren't breaking the 100Mb barrier, not even close. So tell us, who do we complain to. No wait, let me rephrase that, who do we complain to that will actually listen to us?

Barry99705

@johnnyabnormal: I second that thought.

rer89

The people that question why Japan can have those speeds and the US can't must not understand that the land mass of the US is a whole WHOLE lot bigger than Japans, so it's easier to upgrade their infrastructure.

Prey521

Recently in Hungary, in major cities you can get 20Mbps up/down for 21USD. While not Japanese speeds, it's at least one thing that we're ahead of the US :P

PoisonBorz

You complain to the govement that granted them monopolies in many areas and even *paid* for them to put cable out. In a free competitive enviroment, they would have to fight to provide the best survice. Frequently, people have no choice, so no competition happens. The ISP's are just acting like buisness's do....giving you the least they can get away with. Its the fault of (many) successive US govements for blocking competition in this market.

AthenaKepple

$56 for a 1Gbit connection eh? Suddenly my $56 a month 4.5mb download, 356kbps upload service from Comcast seems FUCKED.

dead_red_eyes

@Technogen: Hum didnt let me comment myself that fast let me try again.

[whatis.techtarget.com]

OC-48/STM-16 2.488 Gbps Optical fiber Internet backbone
OC-192/STM-64 10 Gbps Optical fiber Backbone
OC-256 13.271 Gbps Optical fiber Backbone

Technogen

@Technogen: [whatis.techtarget.com]

OC-48/STM-16 2.488 Gbps Optical fiber Internet backbone
OC-192/STM-64 10 Gbps Optical fiber Backbone
OC-256 13.271 Gbps Optical fiber Backbone

Looks like things need to be upgraded at the backbone level before we can have 1gbps connection to everyone, unless of course you want 13 people per backbone...

Technogen

Even if we got 1Gbps connections here in Canada, they'd just be throttled down to dial-up speeds when we actually need to download/upload anything...

Ugh..

aR-Tard

I'd like to know of the US's primary trunk lines can support these sort of speeds. I wonder what the data through put for the primary backbones is.

Technogen

@johnnyabnormal: when you live each day knowing that one tainted bite of fugu sushi could kill you, you don't have time to muck around at slower speeds.

frigg

@Alchemistmerlin: It all started with the first republican meat puppet, Reagan was elected to office. From then the American experience was slowly sold off to foreign and domestic companies. Bush accelerated this process by 100 times to the point where now, we get almost nothing for the highest price on the planet.

EVEs_Mako

@Nastro: Don't be hatin' on the postal service. It's the only government agency that's completely self sufficient (money wise).

cardboredbox

@Nastro: "Govt isnt the solution it's the problem. Can anyone give an example of how the govt would make hi-speed access equal to the japanese wthout raising rates, taxes or utter fucking things over?"

Yes... Korea. The Korean gov't subsidizes universal high speed internet which in turn propels innovation and economic development.

Many people compare it to the gov't building highways as a precursor to interstate commerce. After the gov't built the highways, trucks could shlep shit around which propelled unprecedented economic growth.

By subsidizing fatter, faster, universal internet, the gov't would similarly create infrastructure to support innovation and economic growth. With each bump in internet speeds, new applications that no one anticipated at the slower speeds got born and created new business. It is impossible to predict what new innovation will be possible with faster speeds (although we could probably predict some), but there is no doubt that faster speeds will generate innovation. They always have and will. Increase bandwidth and, ahem, penetration, and a slew of new ideas will slash and burn their way into new businesses as the economy continues to evolve from industry to information.

frigg

does that mean my lab and house will be same speed?
I alrady have 1Gbps in the lab..

hmm.. the 10$ upgrade from 100Mbps to 1Gbps seems worth it!

Long live Japan!

sonaiko

i hate the politicians here in Dominican Republic that don´t make the ISPs give us a decent service... The japanese people will have an 1Gbps internet service for only $56 while i have a fucking piece of crap called ¨Internet Flash¨ that costs to my dad $30 a month for a crappy speed of only 384Kbps...I hate them so much! If i had at least 6Mbps for the actual price i´d be happy.

stopitnow54

@Nastro:

While I don't disagree with your post your pick of the Postal Service as an example of Gov't inefficiency is pretty ignorant.

PittsburghEatsOhioFarts

Why couldn't they just bring it here? I spent 23 hours last week downloading World of Warcraft on my new computer last week. That would take about 11 seconds with fiber-optics. :(

FakeMoon

@Nastro: How exactly would the "public" demand that. write a petition to companies who don't care and are making much more keeping their infrastructure as is or boycott slow internet services. Good luck getting people to jump on that one seeing as a lot people live off the internet no matter how slow. The problem is in todays economy certain aspects are obsolete. When a corporation provides a service to a large enough amount people they can do whatever they want without consumer lash back. This is where the government needs to step in. Comcast would still be limiting bittorrent if the FCC didn't step in. maybe their doing something else now, but it just proves the need for more ISP regulation. In large uncompetitive markets regulation is needed. A market with 6 major carriers for the whole nation is far and above uncompetitive.

Zomb

um this may be irelevant but I live in Costa Rica and they are currently working on a nation wide fiberoptic network to homes. The company in charge is government run and funded. I hope to be cruising at 100GBS and screwing Veoh over. see if i can overload their servers.

smeee

This idiotic spiel again...

First, Japan has several times the population density of the United States. Even the less populated areas still have more than enough people to make the distribution of new wiring, fiber, and hardware cost-effective in situations where American population densities do not.

Secondly, Japan doesn't have the backbone to support those speeds. Japanese bandwidth reporting laws do not have the same textual mandates as American ones; they can quite easily call a fiber-optic link to 200 customers with a mere 200 megabits per second out of the neighborhood 1 gigabit per second connection to customers, as long as they run fiber from the nearest switch to the house.

Thirdly, computer infrastructure really isn't designed for those sort of stuff as it is. There's some specialized drivers that can actually push it, but the cost of supporting that level of bandwidth output means most servers won't bother.

gattsuru

I hate everything about their culture... and yet, I think I'm going to start learning Japanese. I could download the whole internet in like 4 hours.

Decaye

Fµ¢k American cars and internet!!

JAPAN! PLEASE START AN ISP IN AMERICA!!

johnnyabnormal

@Prey521: I they don't understand that japan's government actually supports internet growth where as the US government does nothing. Japan also has thousands of ISPs making it hundred times more competitive. Every time a new ISP happens to show up in the US it gets eaten by a competitor. It is less a question of land mass and more one of competition. Each ISP has so many consumers that they can do whatever they without repercussion. eg. limit bandwith they sell to you, filter, spy, sell your info to telecoms, limit downloads

Zomb

@frigg: Ah, but Americans are eating bovine spongiform encephalopathy in hamburgers, gobbling transfat, guzzling pesticide laced high fructose corn syrup and drinking tainted water. Then we brush our teeth with Chinese anti-freeze toothpaste and feed our dogs pet food chock full of melamine.

By that measure, we should have 100TB fiber connected to our frontal lobes by now!

johnnyabnormal

@PittsburghEatsOhioFarts:

I've gotten mail for the people down the street 15 times this month.

Alchemistmerlin

@Prey521:

What you don't understand is that its more then just about land mass. Japan is a string of islands, even for the smaller rural islands Japan has 155mbs speed, mind you these are islands with populations of around 500 people.

They do this because they have launched ultra-high-speed satellites to cover areas where fiber can't reach. An option available to American rural areas as well and can cover a huge area.

[gizmodo.com]

Its not about land, its more about technology, and we invest in it. In the North America we're talking about capping user speeds like Comcast, the reality is there is more then enough bandwidth for everyone.

Scaramanga

@UltimateIdiot:
You can thank greed for that one

soopafly

@yasudevil: Bastard. I hate you.

shenanigans

This is extremely imbalanced, and makes me rather jealous. If the US' current average speed is still around 5 MB/s down (and perhaps lower), then this sets the new Japanese norm (assuming it becomes that) at around 200 times faster than the US', doesn't it? :(

Descent

@gattsuru:
perhaps the claimed speed is inaccurate...but that doesn't change the fact that the US ranks very low (relative to other industrialized countries) in average connection speeds and price payed for a given bandwidth. Official studies and rankings, which use universal methods of measuring speed and price, consistently rank the US far down on the list.

Even in the densest/richest areas of the US, speeds available do not compare well with Japan's universal offerings. Through the comparitively high price in the US into the picture, and the situation is even worse.

So what if Japan's gigabit service at $56/month is really only 50 Mbps? There are plenty of folks in America stuck paying almost that much for something that is rated at 10x slower...and only rarely reaches that peak speed. And it's capped. And they're tied to a 12-month or 2-year contract, so they can't easily switch if a better service comes along. And anyway, there are probably only 1 or 2 ISP choices in the neighborhood, so there's no real competition anyway...

EQC

@Prey521:
The land-mass argument fails.

Look, for example, at the San Francisco Bay Area -- dense population, rich population, high-tech population. Millions of people...and yet, no gigabit speeds. Not even 100 Mbit speeds. It's just pathetic.

Here in the US, the slowest broadband/DSL speeds back around 2000 were 1.5 Mbps. Today? We've lowered the bar, and now 768 K down and 128 K up are the base-level offerings in many areas. 128 K up. That's only a couple/few times faster than dial up. Embarrassing.

Making matters worse, at least where I live, Verizon charges $21.99 for that 768/128 service AND requires that you also pay for a $28/month land-line phone. So, to get that whopping 768 K download speed (if you're lucky), you've got to pay $50/month plus taxes/fees. So...if I went with Verizon's service, I'd be paying the same price for 768 K DSL that Japan pays for gigabit service...over 1000 times faster. You seriously think that has something to do with land mass?

On principle, I'm currently heading down to the local coffee shop, and giving them my business so I can use their free WiFi. It's a little less convenient, but at least I'm not rewarding Verizon's exploitive business practice with $50/month.

EQC

@UltimateIdiot: I'm sure its partially greed, but there could be a few actual reasons. Would our ISP's be able to support the amount of traffic that this level of speed would most likely produce? If they even tried to they'd probably just raise their prices even higher under the guise of having to pay for all the extra servers and such they had to put online in order to support the rise in speed. Of course there's also the issue that most people here in the US don't even use the 5mb/s connection that they have enough to really need anything else.

Woden501

Guess, Iwe'll have to wait till the spectrum clears up; 1gb/s wireless broadband anyone?

MadCrazy

And in October Comcast will be limiting customers to 250GB per month.
Wow, Comcast is backwards.

zmjjmz

@newdeepdan:

Actually, the translation isn't bad as long as you were trying to say- "I would like to move to Japan, however, my Japanese is not so good."

poisonfist

@johnnyabnormal: Ha! Even by deadly eating habits, the Japanese win on speed. While Americans die a slow, insidious death as leaching plastic, thriving microorganisms, petrifying transfats, carcinogenic dyes, processed foods, and a sugar storm degrade their anatomy until it collapses, the Japanese get a tasty seasonal fish that can kill you almost immediately.

frigg

It's like the fat pipe to nowhere. Seriously, how many net services can feed that?

As to "why not in the USA": look at a map. Note population density and size of nation compared to Japan.

commentotron

@gattsuru:

" First, Japan has several times the population density of the United States. Even the less populated areas still have more than enough people to make the distribution of new wiring, fiber, and hardware cost-effective in situations where American population densities do not."

So why dont areas that have high population density have better speeds ? They dont have to give the whole country those speeds how about just, LA, San Francisco, NYC, Chicago, & DC but that hasnt even happened. There is not one area in this country where you can get speeds anywhere close to that, they could pick an area outside of a major city and test the speeds but they dont even do that.

utube2007

even if we got this in the US company's like comcast would be chomping at the bit to put a data cap on it lol.

spider2544

@frigg: True. Maybe I have it all wrong eating maguro for the mercury. Fugu it is!!

johnnyabnormal

@Prey521:

" the land mass of the US is a whole WHOLE lot bigger than Japans, so it's easier to upgrade their infrastructure"

okay is there any reason why there is not an area about the size of Japan in the US that doesnt have there speeds than by your asumptions. How about California, or the East Coast from Boston to Richmond thats about the size of Japan and its a megaopolis so why cant they have the japanese speeds.

utube2007

@Alchemistmerlin: At least the Post Office provides a service unlike other government agencies.

utube2007

@Woden501: you do realize that Japans population is really close to that of our own, and more people use the internet more often over there, thus generating MORE traffic then we do. our ISPs should be able to keep up with us, and probably can, they just don't want to put out the initial expense of putting in GOOD(i'm looking at you Verizon) fiber.

Mister Cow Pnoy

It's kind of ironic that Japan gets faster KDDI porn downloads. Wotas, rejoice!

albtms

"If the outcome of the 2008 election doesn't get me to move to another country, these currently untouchable download speeds just might."

Please do. And try getting away with a comment like this when you get there. Dumb ass.

bthivierge

I want!

Sadly though this type of speed for consumers will be available in the US some time in the mid 2150s ( not a typo ), maybe not even then. Oh and of course it will come with a bandwidth cap of 10Gbs so you can use up all your bandwidth in 10 seconds or less. WHOOT!

StarControl

God dammit, japan is so much more pro than us (in the USA(

Jitty

@newdeepdan:
お前・・・
○|￣|＿

terebakashi

This was available years ago here. Just not advertised because nobody really needs it. Ill probably upgrade to see if I can break my record of 1.5 terabytes in a day.

kiwizz

To all the "Lazy, American consumers" commenters,
When we do complain companies blame their own customers and put limits on bandwidth instead of speaking to the real issue of their own capabilities. We pay out the nose and usually end up spending more on other products we wouldn't deal with if it didn't make our broadband cheaper.

Final

@utube2007:

Because getting speeds from NYC to anywhere else depends on the population density of the intermediate areas. You need either repeaters or switches every ~100 kilometers at higher bandwidths, and barely gets you from D.C. to Baltimore. American corporations have to get you the corresponding backbone speed or they're not allowed to advertise that rate.

In Japan, that's not the case, and it's not the case on both counts.

gattsuru

@wooties: Aww man, 50Mbps isnt fast enough, lol

pdditty

using a 5Mbps line here in Canada, can't imagine what 1Gbps would look like. Seeing how large Canada is, I can't imagine internet speeds reaching that here in the near future.

CyberG4

@dead_red_eyes: Dude, no joke. ;[ I worked for a major ISP and it doesn't even take that to see how hard we're getting shafted.

00000000

AMERICA, FUCK YEAH!

Please. You can be patriotic, but don't let it blind you, monkey.

albinolove

i don't know why you guys are complaining so much. In Australia, you pay AU$70 which is US$58 for 30mbps Hi speed cable and get this, 12Giga bytes cap on downloads. Once you have reached 12 gigabytes of downloads, internet speed crawls to stone age speed of 28.8kps. And no there is no unlimited access plan in Australia. Does that suck or what!

SpiffySteve

the japanese must download a lot of porn.

taphntm

Wow, it'd be nice for our completely out of touch service providers to take a look at Japan. They have cell phones light years ahead of ours and now their networking(which was better before) is now millions of light years ahead of ours. But our ISPs would rather cap us of bandwidth due to a lie of a bandwidth crunch than build a better system.

Sollus

FUCK thats SPEEDY

NASA is the culprit in suckin' bandwidth = 1Tb/s

shanzi

@bthivierge:

LOLOLOL. Somebody actually believing that the U.S. has more freedom of speech/expression than "socialist" countries like Europe and Japan, hahaha. That's so funny.

Dearhaw

Can you imagine even if most of the major businesses or universities at least had a pipe that big. I mean yeah I'm thinking the consumer here but even if they reached out to these bigger entities then we could at least be one step closer to getting it to the consumer.

I'm not asking a full United States wide implementation. But hell even having it in major cities slowing popping in place would be godsend.

Instead we're stuck with Verizon FIOS and limited by a factor of 166x if you compare that to Comcast's 6mbps.

I'd love to see google step in and buy a few high end OC lines and start dropping those all over the place :D

addiktion

@yasudevil:

*drools*

addiktion

@The-Joker: 頑張って。

blacksamurai87

@johnnyabnormal: The ISP's here, it's just neutered. KDDI already has ISP operations in the US, but they only deal with business customers this side of the Pacific. I wonder why...

jamar0303

@commentotron: So why aren't we seeing it on the coasts either (where population density DOES match Japan's)? Who says that "flyover country" needs to be included (and they can be using satellites instead of wires)?

jamar0303

@utube2007: New Yorkers on FiOS can get 50Mbps/20Mbps from Verizon.

UnnDunn

@EQC: To be fair, the same $50/mo will pay for 20Mbps/5Mbps FiOS service.

And yes, infrastructure is a huge barrier. Verizon is investing billions of dollars in upgrading its entire communications network to fiber, but they are also taking a huge gamble to do it.

There is also the issue of corporate greed. The US Government did give the major ISPs huge incentives to upgrade their networks over a decade ago, but they dragged their feet.

UnnDunn

OK, 1 Gbps is basically more than 99% of hard drives can realistically read continuously. Are we downloading porn into RAID and/or raptors now?

andyo

@frigg: Your name sounds like one of Palin's children!

capitalass

@UnnDunn: Which is much closer to Japan's current speeds. I think that these are definitely fair arguments. One can't really compare US internet capabilities to Japan's given the geography and population density that the US faces.

Japan: 127M people in less than 400,000 sq. km
US: 300M in about 10,000,000 sq. km.

Despite all that, I think that the major contributing factor is that Japan does not have those comcasts or timewarners that we have. They may enjoy watching more rape porn, but american's just enjoy getting...

why do I say these things? apologies in advance.

capitalass

@cardboredbox: That's because every time you go to the f*ing post office, they say, "would you like fries with that?" or some other bullsh*t line to sell you services that you don't need.

whatnot22

I hear there's lots of internet in Californee...Did you see the ghost?

GadgetPlay

@bthivierge: Please ignore Dearhaw, he stayed up past his bedtime on a school night, and now he's a bit cranky. He'll be better after his nap and some Redbull.

GadgetPlay

@The-Joker:

OR.... you could vote for people that understand the difference between bullshit (RIAA/P2P/Non-Neutraility) and the importance of infrastructure.

este

@GadgetPlay:

Oh, hai, shill. Care to offer a counter argument -- i.e., that the U.S. indeed does have more freedom of speech/expression than European countries/Japan?

Ah, don't worry, just fuckin' with ya. I already know that you can't :-p

I hope you're enjoying the FUBAR that is the McCain/Palin campaign as much as I am!

Dearhaw

Looking at these conversations, it looks like the speed of 1.5mbps and 250 gb download is less for people. Here in India let me tell you a Broad-band plan. download/upload limit : 1GB Max speed: 1mbps(220kbps actual) 50% time the net is down. 450Rs(aprox $10) PS : Govt says 156 kbps + is Broadband !! And yeah for the bigger download like WOW -- there are many cheap cds and dvd in Rs 80(little less in $2)............ :( I really ashamed to say, There is lot of piracy in India,,, and people like me who spends 4000 for getting xp/vista are considered as ignorant compare to people who got that <$2 cd/dvds

SiddhiCachuwanna

Only $56 a month???? Here, a really bad 5/1 mbps connects costs that much (and more with taxes) We hate you, Japan.

MePerson

@Prey521: Yeah, and Japan aren't scared of spending the money to do it, as many other countries are... Still, the price is great, $56 eh? Thats only around... £28.

BlendaMorris

I believe the ISPs are out just to make money. Look at how they try to cap downloads (comcast) and usage. They complain their networks aren't capable to handle such constant and high usages. What if we did get speeds of 1Gbps but our downloads were capped at 100gb....

Steven5210

@Barry99705: I remember the days of Uncapped @Home. Man, I was getting like 24Mbps/5Mbps on my SB cable modem for a good time. Until they started packing more and more customers on the same end. Then it went to like 3Mb/128K. Until I ended up with Charter. Well, $22 for 24/mos for 10Mb/1Mb is not too shabby for now. :-)

logikgr

Fast forward 30 years... Rogers will be releasing a 1 Gbps in Sept 30 2038. Fineprint... 10 GB bandwidth cap (upload and download).

BattistaKligmanic

Right now, I'm wondering why the hell a 1 Gbps ISP is charging $56 for the service and it's $139 for the fastest (Which is A LOT less than 1 Gbps) FiOS service from Verizon here. Now THAT is unfair.

AbbottGalupie

Failing at space??? WTF are you talking about NASA has had success after success on all of there recent probes, rovers and satellites. The only thing that is behind schedule is the shuttle replacement. The stuff we did 50 years ago is still unparalleled by anyone outside of Russia. As far as internet goes the US is hundreds of times larger and more spread out than Japan and those other small Asian countries. We still do have the highest density of internet capable people in the world. The thing holding us back are the huge distances separating rural cities and houses. Besides I have 9mbit cable at my house, which is more than I need for now.

TimothyCeleus

The candidates have a VERY important factor in this!! Heard of something called net neutrality? If you would do your research, you'd know that we should be very fearful as the internet we know it today may not be here tomorrow. I suggest you read the technology sections of Obama and McCain on their websites and see where they stand. There is already a private network made by the government called internet 2. This network is much faster than what we have now. Yet, we're not using it because they are setting up a system similar to the pay plans of cable, where you have to pay for what you want to see on the internet. Search "death of the internet" on youtube. You'll be surprised. Sites like gizmodo and many other smaller blogs are in danger! Look it up! savetheinternet.com

ZaredNugglet

So what. I live in sweden and have had a one gbps connection for about a year. Before that i had a 100 mbps connection for about five years. And yes. It is commonly available over here. Its nice to live in the only country in the world thats acctually ahead of japan when it comes to IT. It's just a shame it's like 40 below and snowy nine moths a year.

WilburCachu