The key is that DSL in Japan, both copper and fiber, are unbundled. NTT, the incumbent national phone company, has built out all of the last mile infrastructure and any ISP is able to CoLo in the CO to provide service. The DSLAM in the CO, the last mile drop and the modem in the home or office are all controlled by NTT. The ISPs’ access routers are all connected to NTT’s DSLAM and the DSLAM routes the subscriber’s connection to the appropriate ISP using PPPoE. (It’s as simple as putting your assigned User ID, UserName@MyISP.ne.jp, and your assigned password into your router’s PPPoE boxes.)

The problem in the US seems to stem from the ILECs having convinced the FCC a decade ago that the only way they could afford to introduce DSL was to keep it artificially married to a live POTS service, which they, of course, would own. This has prevented the US from taking advantage of faster DSL-over-copper technology (48Mbps/1Mbps copper service for about $35 per month is common in Japan) that might have been cost effective in the US if the ILECs hadn’t been forcing each ISP to install its own DSLAM in each individual CO they wished to serve, instead of the ILEC owning the DSLAM and charging a regulated price to the ISP for access to the subscriber local loop.

It’s not rocket science. It’s just the inevitable backlash of short term greed over long term social responsibility.

First of all, any network “plan” that is touting LESS than a gigabit at this juncture is obsolete before one shovelful of earth is moved. Wake up. The future is multiple gigabit (for many reasons) and anything not running right now better be designed to that minimum standard.

I criticized EDUCAUSE’s plan over a year ago. Anything in the planning stages last year SHOULD HAVE BEEN in the gigabit range in order to be competitive as well as something that can regain the lead for the US.

100Mbps is NOT THE FUTURE. In many developments of high tech real estate (Intelligenr business campuses) 100Mbps is not even “today or yesterday”. High tech campuses are at 40Gbps and going to 100Gbps network infrastructures. A gig to your house would be about right.

As for Auto workers, I like how we are bailing out Industrial Age jobs but we let over 1,000,000+ IT/ Telecom jobs evaporate into offshore and H1B Visa jobs. Ever figure that the loss of the combined buying power of all those people has led to the economic slowdown that we are in today?

We need to have a state-of-the-art network infrastructure in order to compete globally today. Most people do not have a clue what that really means.

And to add to the comments above about the old adage of “those that can’t – teach.” The new adage should be – “those that do – MUST TEACH” because those that teach don’t have a clue.

“EDUCAUSE … offered up a $100 billion plan”.

Billion, with a B. Big difference…

If it isn’t the FCC wringing new competition out of the picture, it’s local governments giving monopoly status to one or two providers. This needs to end.

I don’t want one red cent of MY money put towards faster broadband for anyone. You “it’s too slow” folks are stealing from me enough for your other causes, stay out of my broadband.

For me, and for a VAST majority of users, latency is far more important than overall speed. 20mbit/s? Who needs it? Give me 60 second ping times from popular servers, and I’d happily take 512kbps.

Quoting EDUCAUSE’s wishlist is equally frightening, since it requires about 2-3x more money than Reed Hundt wanted in his last “Broadband for everyone” comments prior to the presidential election… I mean that whole phrase “Of those who can’t do, teach” comes in pretty sharp.

Let’s play a thought problem that ahem one phone company will not touch at this point in time — If a Fi ber Optical Service build in a metro area currently takes a 7 to 10 year build — say, the times given for builds in three Northeastern cities linked together by Amtrack — could adding more money to the buildouts accelerate the deployment timeframe? If so, by how much? Or is this one of this mythical-man-month problems and the time is the time unless you want to declare a national emergency state?

Does this accelerated timescale require more ditch-diggers? Are those ditch-diggers available? Do you have to train more ditch-diggers (laid-off auto workers)? Will there be an increased demand for fiber? Do you ignore Corning’s desire to put in the latest-greatest high-quality fiber or do you gold-plate the network?

Oops, wait, the cable companies think it’s unfair that the Fi Optical Service carrier has received money from the government. Do you now provide money to the cable company for it to upgrade plant?

What strings do you attach to that money? Net neutrality strings? What if the operator refuses to take the money to accelerate the build with the strings attached, what then?

Look to the auto industry. Ford is not taking government money, and its executives will be keeping their independence and their perks.

This is all pipe dreams.

Government interference is always a bad idea. I can’t believe the whining welfare mentality shown in most of these comments.

the first step should be a nationwide free network no matter how slow.

also although i am usually a huge advocate of net neutrality i would support the idea of a completely free to users network that sold access to the web hosting firms as their source of revenue; even though it may mean users would only have access to those sites. of course anyone would be able to offer a proxy service to the entire internet after buying wholesale access to the back end of the network. we would conceivably have competition between these proxy services. the question would be whether any peer2peer use could fit this model. i would only support this if it was totally free for end users. it would seem agianst the intersts of whoever would run such a network to limit speeds since they would get paid by the web hosting firms for the amount of data that transverses the network.

I’m willing to pay an extra $360 in taxes if it would mean that I would no longer have to pay the cable/phone company for broadband and that every american household/business would have access to high-speed broadband.

This is a win-win for the whole country in my eyes.

And “Free 768 kbps broadband to all of America” sounds pretty darn good – not “slow as molasses” to me. I’m paying $29 / mo for DSL which doesn’t get much faster than that anyway and it certainly isn’t wireless. And think about the benefit for all those poor souls still trapped on dial up.