I find it ironic that I live in Tokyo, where Internet access is perhaps more advanced than anywhere in the world–heck, I even teach computer classes–and yet I’m stuck at about 1.5 Mbps, which for the uninitiated, means I can download almost 200KB per second, or the equivalent of a floppy disk in 7 seconds (which, ironically, is faster than a floppy drive could read all of that data to my hard drive). To many in the U.S., this may sound pretty fast; broadband speeds in America are now fairly slow, slower than they were 2-3 years ago in fact. My father pays about what I do for a 300 Kbps (0.3 Mbps) DSL connection; to get even close to my speed, he’d have to cough up $70 a month or more.

A bit about Internet connections first (those in the know skip to the next paragraph). While data on a disk is measured in bytes, transmission speeds are measured in bits, which are one-eighth of a byte. 100 KB (kilobytes), for example, is 800 Kb (kilobits, that’s a lowercase “b”). The slowest connection nowadays is referred to as “dialup,” or “analog,” which means you stick your telephone line directly into the back of your computer and then dial the telephone number of your Internet service provider (ISP). This gives a theoretical maximum of 56 Kb per second, more realistically about 40. The next step up is ISDN, which allows you to dial up the Internet on your computer while at the same time using the phone to call someone; it uses a digital line, and gets you up to 64Kbps. Then there’s a big jump up to DSL, which ranges from just over a megabit (Mb) per second to 12 Mbps, and soon up to 26 Mbps. And finally, fiber optic cables, which go considerably faster than that–top speed of 100 Mbps.

Up to about three years ago, Japan was hopelessly behind. We were stuck with either analog dialup or ISDN, which sucks because both require not only a monthly charge for the telephone line but you also have to pay by the minute–Japan has no free local telephone calls. Meanwhile, in the U.S., my father had DSL and was getting about a megabit of broadband DSL, which you can stay connected to all day long, no phone charges incurred.

Then things flip-flopped. The U.S. hit its current economic slump, and American DSL providers started raising rates and lowering speeds. Japan, in a program to help the country out of its decade-long economic crisis, completed a new phase of its Internet infrastructure plan and got DSL, quickly followed by fiber optic. DSL speeds started out at 1.5 Mbps, then got upgraded to 8 Mbps and 12 Mbps, and recently they started selling 26 Mbps (more than 3MB sent per second at theoretical top speed!). DSL costs only about $20 per month here, including ISP fees. I have the 12 Mbps service, but because I live in a nice, big place in a remote, gree area, I am more than 2 km from the switching station and so my speed is degraded, probably at about 2 Mbps–but I’m not complaining, er, too much.

I looked into getting fiber optic, but the cables are big and stiff and cannot be fitted into most older buildings, like mine. If it were possible, I could get 100Mbps (12.5 megabytes per second) for about $70 a month, same as my father in California would pay SBC for a connection 1/100th as fast. However, I can get fiber optic at the school where I work. We got the connection for the school a year ago, and it is fast. So fast, in fact, that we can’t get near the top speeds because almost no one else has such a fast connection to send the data. But I have pulled down data from Apple’s web site at 2 megabytes per second. What’s funny here is that my school of 300 students or so has had this for a while now, and I see CNN articles about how a 40,000-student university in the states is bragging about their new 100 Mbps connection.

There is hope for my apartment in the Tokyo outback, though. A new service, called VDSL (yeah, I know), may be available in a year or two; VDSL brings fiber optic to a local phone switch, then converts to DSL. I’ve been told that we could get 18 Mbps by then.