Wow! 50 Mbps for just $140 a month!
The San Francisco Bay Area, home of Silicon Valley and the hi-tech supergiants, is getting super-charged, lightning-fast 50 Mbps Internet connections! And for just $140 a month, how can you beat that?
Of course, if you’ve read this blog a lot before, you know that this is hardly impressive. Japan had these kinds of speeds available more or less nation-wide about five years ago. And even when it first came, it cost nowhere near $140–50 Mbps ADSL has always hovered between $40 and $50 a month, roughly what I pay for 100 Mbps fiber-optic today. Even out in Inagi, a town out in the hills and forests, I got 70 Mbps fiber optic vDSL service in late 2004.
Somehow, I find it very hard to believe that the only reason is that America is a bigger place. Five years late, three times as expensive, in one of the more densely-populated and highest-tech corners of the country? More like a stunning lack of a government Internet policy coupled with Telecoms squeezing every penny out of systems both old and new,
This angers me beyond belief. This has nothing to do with the size of the country, it has everything to do with laziness and greed. I recently received a bump in my speeds from 5 mbps down/500 kbs up to 8 mbps down/500 kbs up, but that of course came with a price increase. I am paying $63 a month for these speeds. I feel like vomiting every time I see you are Danny Choo talk about your speeds and what you pay each month.
This is going to become a major problem in the USA, and we are already seeing companies look elsewhere for offices due to our lack of a sufficient Internet infrastructure. It is going to cost us jobs and contracts if we don’t do something about this and soon!
If I remember correctly, Japan is working on/has already completed a national coverage of 1 Gig/sec. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything similar here in the States, privately or publicly. We have a whole lot of catching up to do. And while I agree that national coverage is far less doable for the US, there’s no excuse for the lack of coverage in major cities nationwide if we tried.