Japanese Online Connectivity Ahead of EU/US 259
An anonymous reader writes "The experience of getting online in North America and Europe is years behind the internet connectivity options in Japan, the New York Times reports. While here in the US cable and DSL options are still struggling to reach rural areas, eight million Japanese consumers are now enjoying fiber optic speeds at home for comparable prices. The article explores the fiber-to-the-doorstep approach the country's telecoms are taking, with examination of both the ups and downs of such an ambitious project. 'The heavy spending on fiber networks, analysts say, is typical in Japan, where big companies disregard short-term profit and plow billions into projects in the belief that something good will necessarily follow. Matteo Bortesi, a technology consultant at Accenture in Tokyo, compared the fiber efforts to the push for the Shinkansen bullet-train network in the 1960s, when profit was secondary to the need for faster travel. "They want to be the first country to have a full national fiber network, not unlike the Shinkansen years ago, even though the return on investment is unclear."'"
Not that hard when you look at the size (Score:2, Insightful)
Expected Cost: 11x (Score:2)
Re:Expected Cost: 11x (Score:5, Insightful)
I keep hearing this excuse, but it really doesn't add up. I've visited Japan and spent quite a bit of time in the USA. Comparing Tokyo to NYC seems fair; they seemed to have similar population densities. Does NYC have the same level of connectivity as Tokyo? I also stayed in a small town in Japan (Takada, for anyone who's interested), and I've seen a lot of American towns of similar size; do they all have comparable connectivity? Getting the connection to the city is fairly cheap, it's the last mile that is the really expensive bit, and the cost of that is relative to population density.
The low average population density of the USA is often given as an excuse, but it ignores population distribution. If you look at a map showing the population density over the whole world, the western half of the USA, with the exception of a few dots and some very dense concentrations on the western seaboard, is almost completely empty in relative terms. If you confine yourself to the eastern half, you'll see huge areas the same density as Japan, and the rest the same or greater density than the EU.
Yes, Japan does have an advantage in terms of overall population density (although it is far more mountainous than most of the populated places of the USA), but nothing like a factor of 20 advantage for the vast majority of the population of the USA.
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Re:Not that hard when you look at the size (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Not that hard when you look at the size (Score:5, Insightful)
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The choice to build or not to build network infrastucture is a business decision. For some reason, US companies just don't seem to consider it profitable to offer fast inexpensive internet access to Americans.
Its not that. Japan, Korea, and the other "high bandwidth" Asian countries' governments have a much higher degree of involvement with their telecom infrastructure. Essentially, the telecom market in Japan is the same as it was in the US before deregulation. Therefore, the government can mandate a
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... maybe because it's not (profitable)?!?
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Did your grandparents throw up their arms and make excuses about how big the place was? Did they whine? Did they look the other way and say it wasn't such a big deal when other countries surpassed them?
Why is it that everytime this topic comes up on Slashdot, the discussion gets filled with whining about your population density?
Suck it up! Lagging behind in technology is NOT a good thing. Get it up to snuff or you risk facing serious negative effects in the long term.
Re: Not that hard when you look at the size (Score:4, Informative)
http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/image/earth_night.jpg [nasa.gov]
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We Americans are just ahead of the curve in spotlight technology. I mean, we've got Batman. You need to be winning that race.
That goes without saying (Score:5, Funny)
Doh. That's as obvious as saying "Mortality is the leading cause of death".
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Wow, things must be going backwards over there!
First Post... (Score:5, Funny)
'Cause I'm posting from Japan!
Re:First Post... (Score:5, Funny)
Fiber rollout in the US? (Score:2)
Googling around for stats on Verizon FIOS seems like as of 2Q 2007, they claim 3.9 million homes have FIOS availability, and are aiming for 18 million by 2010. http://www.mediabuyerplanner.com/2007/10/01/comcast-starting-to-feel-heat-from-verizons-fios/ [mediabuyerplanner.com]
As for actual customers numbers, I have no idea, but am curious. I happen to live in an area--Northern VA--where I know a decent number of people with FIOS, though I still have cable modem..
Are there
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And that is an interesting stat. One which does highlight the (some call fallacious) size disparity.
The 2005 census [stat.go.jp] in Japan had them at 49 million households. The 2000 US census shows 105 million. Wiring up 18 million households would represent a far greater percentage of Japan's population than that of the US.
Are we really that far behind? Maybe not.
I have Verizon FIOS available, but like you, still on cable.
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If the fiber pipe comes to their house, and they don't subscribe...who, precisely, is to blame for us being 'behind'?
For those 8 million Japanese, what was their alternative before the fiber came in? I'm not sure, just asking the question.
What I'm saying is...rightly or wrongly, the current alternatives in the US are often seen as acceptable to many users. If it was dialup OR fiber, no contest. Bring me the glass. But if it's dialup OR cable/DSL OR fib
Of course... (Score:3, Insightful)
We might want to discuss all the various reasons as to why America has fallen so much behind. In the past, we brought up land area and population density while forgetting that some countries in northern Europe with lower density fare better. Nobody ever brought this up even if that's one big obvious difference right there.
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If we both have 100,000 square acres of land, and I have 100 people and you have 200 people, I have less density than you.
Now, if my population all live in a 50 square acre area, and yours lives in a 1000 square acre area, your distribution of density is a lot wider. It's easier to wire you than to wire me.
For example, Sweden. 9 million people spread over 410,000 square kilometers for a density of 22 people per square kilometer. The US has
it's a series of tubules (Score:5, Funny)
Unfortunately, the "connectivity" is in the form of tentacles.
an odd comparison (Score:2)
Could you be any more clueless? (Score:5, Insightful)
The article is about fiber to the home, not for long-haul transport. Even in rural Wyoming there is fiber everywhere, except for the last part to the user. You don't have to lay humongous amounts of new fiber, the backbone infrastructure is already in use, again, even in Wyoming. You just have to make an effort to replace the last mile(s) to the home.
In Japan they are willing to do that, because there isn't an immediate lust for profit. A sort of "if you build it, profit will/may come". For that same reason it will never happen in the US. Because you --as a people-- are shallow, narrow minded pricks with a degenerate obsession for short-term money.
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Oh, you mean cheap fiber? Yeah, we have this little thing in the US about free markets and really only forcing certain utilities via taxes, unlike most countries. Our utilities are typically private companies, or managed as such. Means that rather than getting taxed $100 per month and "paying" $30/month fo
Deconstructing the Japan Inc Hype (Score:2, Insightful)
Japan is a tiny island. The United States consists of the fairly large part of the North American continent and Europe, taken together, is not entirely tiny either. Of course it will be easier to wire Japan than it would be the USA or Europe.
People that argue that Japan is somehow doing something "unprofitable" to get a strategic gain need to wonder
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And the reality is that American telecommunications are both run by monopolies and impossible to break into (we all saw how Apple got bullied around by AT&T). When the bulk of the U.S. is still using dial-up, its hard to say that Japanese telecommunication is a hype.
Love that high speed internet (Score:5, Informative)
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What's the upstream? Is it synchronous?
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I'm on 100Mb/S right now. (Score:3, Interesting)
What I find, though, is that I never get anything like this kind of data throughput because most of the web is throttled at a few mb/s per connection and many sites are getting smart to users with download managers and restricting the number of connections at any one time. It's frustrating to have to wait 15 minutes to
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I think you might just be on a wrong system. As far as I know the Japanese do not use BitTorrent in any large numbers, their thing was Winny, and after that got cracked by the cops (sort of) the thing that replaced it is called Share.
Winny and Share are quite sophisticated systems in
Infrastructure considerations (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Infrastructure considerations (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Infrastructure considerations (Score:5, Insightful)
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Germany/holland etc were levelled, and although connectivity is good there it's as good as Japan..
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Over here in my town (Eindhoven , the Netherlands) I was lucky to live in the right spot where we got free installment and one year of fiber connection. After that year we could choose to continue and had a choice of extras like telephony and tv channels through the fiber.
Last month I saw the sign put up announcing 1200 more homes connected to fiber in a neighbourhood next to mine.
I can't tell how it is in Japan, but fiber is starting to grow here and
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But you're fooling yourself if you believe this is the only reason. Most countries in their position would simply be left behind other ones which didn't suffer such damages during WWII.
Matter of fact is, Japanese people operate better in society, their motivation goes far beyo
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And you're fooling yourself if you think this isn't a reason. Certainly not the whole, but a significant factor.
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Japan was NOT leveled during WW2. Hiroshima and Nagasaki was, but the country a a whole did not.
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Also interesting to note that Hiroshima and Nagasaki's atomic bombing caused LESS infrastructure damage than that delivered to Toyama or Tokushima, in terms of percentage of city destroyed.
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Why? Because the market (although free) is not competative. You simply cannot get more than 8mb (from the cable provider) and s
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profits...? (Score:4, Informative)
Profits and/or speed were not the drivers as claimed. Much of the construction was financed by a US$80 million loan from the World Bank. USD$80 mil in 1960 dollars is approx. 1/2 billion in today's money.
The initial project was originally discussed in the 1930's with construction beginning in 1959 - the Tokaido Shinkansen started running on October 1, 1964, in time for the Tokyo Olympics. National pride was (and still is) the driver, not the need for speed...
Notice that China is following a similar process, with the Maglev in Shanghai running at 433 kph and drawing significant attention as the 2008 Olympics in China are just around the corner.
Also, note that "Shinkansen bullet-train" is redundant - 'bullet train' is a literal translation, thank you very much.
One word - kaizen (Score:2)
The initial project was originally discussed in the 1930's with construction beginning in 1959 - the Tokaido Shinkansen started running on October 1, 1964, in time for the Tokyo Olympics.
I rode on that line regularly between Kobe and Tokyo in 2002 (maybe a couple dozen times). The Shinkansen puts any other public transportation I've ever been on to shame[1].
Japan was wired with ISDN first (Japan was all ISDN when I got there in 1999). My Japanese keitai in 2002 still has some features not available in the US today (the dictionary mode works right, to name one).
There is a lot to love about engineering in Japan. I wi
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From inside, it is hard to tell you are even moving - you need the readouts and a look out the window to be sure. From the outside, things are a bit different. I was on a platform one time, several hundred meters away from a tunnel, when a Shinkansen emerged full speed...the salarymen simply kept reading their newspapers and reached for something to hold on to. As the train blasts from the tunnel, your skin crawls in react
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What exactly is.. (Score:2)
I didn't realize fiber optics had a speed. I thought it was just a tunnel for light.
WTF is fiber optic speed? How about Japanese get 45 gigamillizetabits/s and eu/us gets 6mb/s. That has meaning. I can run 10mb/s over a copper wire, I can run 1000mb/s over the same copper wire. At one point in time, it was the fastest you could do over that copper wire. If I said "copper wire speed" people would think I as dumb.
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]{
The article does some heavy glorifying (Score:3, Interesting)
I have ordered some ADSL subscription from Yahoo and NTT, but I have not yet recieved any confirmation on my order (was 3 weeks ago).
I talked to some friends here in Tokyo and they confirm that the internet really is this bad; they are used to NAT, low international speeds and very irregular and poor performing national speeds.
Compared to the 24/8 mbit DSL I have in Sweden (we also have fiber in Sweden, but not in the area where I live) the internet service is light years behind, even though it on paper sound very good with fiber to the home and all. At home in Sweden I always get 24/8 when tested against the speed test servers in Sweden. Sweden have excelent international connectivity and uploading stuff to friends in the states is usually done at around 4 mbit/s. The internet is also very stable and I usually have bittorrent running 24/7 resulting in some 1000 GB transfer every month. That would be impossible here in Japan, because they seem to be a lot more draconian about what you may and may not do. For example I may not use P2P applications or use a lot of bandwidth (some examples given, chatting with webcam). In Sweden noone cares and everyone is just uploading stuff like there is no tomorrow; resulting in even faster backbones and better infrastructure since the ISPs must invest more to cope.
Generally I find that many things in Japan is about sounding good or seeming to be good but how it is in reality is not that important. I think a major problem is that they actually do not have that much internet infrastructure, very weak backbone and most networks are build "ad-hoc" without a bigger plan, just run another fiber down the telephone poles and hook it up at nearest station.
But the people here don't seem to mind that much. They use cellular phones for communication and Wii or PS3 for computer games. The internet here *is* yahoo for most people. The only person I have met so far that was a heavy internet user was a foreign worker from Vietnam
Anyhow, back to the article; the article is the result of a combination of Japanese "look good on paper" with the journalist quest for write impressive articles and a bit of "It is always greener on the other side of the fence"-thinking.
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Japan's internal network is actually quite fast. Things are only NATed because most people do not know how to set-up port forwarding on the router. I currently have fiber and while most things I download only reach ~ 600k, I suspect that in part due to my downloading them from the west (see below) and in part due to my 11Mbps wifi card.
The connection times to Europe do tend to suck a bit. EG it can take 5-10sec to connect via SSH to boxs in the UK an Russia. This is due to all connections being routed via
Summary somehow wrong (Score:5, Informative)
How many mistakes can one make in single sentence?
First, Europe is years behind Japan and South Korea -- those pesky Asians go head to head in wiring their countries. Europe, even Western isn't uniformly connected, there are years worth of difference between the countries. North America isn't uniform either: Cannada is basically on pair with Western Europe, while US fell years behind even some Eastern European countries.
I mean, I live in Warsaw/Poland, far from the city centre and I have a choice of two physical cable operators, and two physical DSL operators. On top of that, one of the DSL operators (TPSA) is a monopolist (dominant operator in today lingo) wich by law has to sell BSA and WLR to dozen or so virtual DSL operators which compete with each other and with TPSA. I don't think you can get this kind of choice even in NY, which is a part of megalopolis with the biggest population on Earth and one of the biggest population densities in the world.
Wroclaw (Breslau for those teutonically inclined) is a much smaller city, yet it had fiber laid in sewers couple of years ago, reaching all parts of the city with speeds up to 100Mbps.
And don't even get me started on municipal and private wifi networks in rural areas... They just work, selling not only IP, but also phone services based on VoIP.
Robert
Fascination with technology and matter of honor (Score:2)
I have the feeling many managers would get a heart attack reading this. But don't we read every day stuff like
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Regulation. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:Regulation. (Score:4, Insightful)
2) Monoploys think its too expensive to install so ignore the idea.
3) fibre Start-ups can't break into the telecommunications monopoly.
4) go to 1
Capitalism is the idea that you can control greed. It works for individuals but not for super rich companies that control a monopoly.
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Some examples:
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These other companies, after having demonstrated some success & savvy, will be able to raise money to do their own network rollouts after having bootstrapped on leased lines. In turn, once they build their own networks, they'll also be required to lease their lines, however, they'll be able to lease other companies' lines to fill the holes in their network.
By and large, it seems to have worked; in most European cou
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Also Fiberoptic in large Russian cities (Score:2, Informative)
The family I lived with had a 8Mbit/s down / 256 kbit/s up ADSL connection. Pretty nice for Russia, I thought. One day they told me, that someone would come "to make the Internet faster". Ok, I thought. What will happen, it's already fast. Install some Voodoo software to tweak IP option optimized for ADSL?
The next day some people from the Inter
America doing it too... (Score:2)
If it's considered ambitious for a tiny country like Japan to be doing this, then it's downright mind boggling that Verizon is doing thi
Reasons why this may be true (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Telcoms. Yes, the telcoms screwed the pooch. They were supposed to have this a lot farther along than it is. But they're getting to it. Currently, Verizon has ~4 million households wired for fiber. But they are they only company rolling out fiber? And I'm glad it's only one. I really don't want ALL of them digging up my yard every few months.
2. States vs countries. The US is not a monolithic block. Rather, it is a collection of 50 states, each with their own rules, etc.
3. Size. All you clowns saying size/density doesn't matter are FOC. It is significantly easier to wire 50 million houses than 105 million. And when you consider the physical distance between houses, it's even more expensive. Wiring up 20 houses per mile is harder/slower/more costly than 50 houses per mile. US houses generally have more land between. Which leads us to
4. But why aren't the cities wired? Equal density to Tokyo. Well...Tokyo doesn't have a 150 year old infrastructure. NYC infrastructure, for instance, is horrendous. Chicago the same. Pulling yet another new set of lines through there would be a nightmare. Tokyo and a host of other cities [ditext.com] in Japan were leveled in WWII. Some almost totally. With a large influx of worldwide money, they started over in the 50's.
Verizon seems to be concentrating on the smaller midsize cities and suburbs first, rather than trying to tackle the hardest nuts first.
5. Customer inertia. Most of the US has had cable/DSL available for a while. Even with it available, a lot of people don't see a personal need for it. Now comes in fiber. Convince me to change. What type of connectivity did the average house in Japan have? Did they go through a long period of 'better than dialup'? I have fiber available, but am satisfied with my current cable connection. I haven't seen a need (yet) to restructure my house connections and billing again.
Are we behind? Maybe, maybe not. But there are a variety of reasons why this may be true, other than just "The Japanese are so much better than the US."
Ummm... (Score:2)
The return on their investment is clear (Score:2)
Western companies can't seem to see past end-of-year figures and shareholder meetings.
Re:Population density? Small land mass? (Score:5, Informative)
All that you say is quite correct, but there are significant differences between why it is being done in Japan and not done in the USA. Firstly, Japan is claiming that it is not being done to realise immediate profit. I think that is quite forward thinking, and not the sort of behaviour that I imagine we will ever see in the US. Secondly, they also believe that if the superfast network is made available then the innovative use of that network will automatically follow. I agree. Clever people will start to imagine novel uses for such a network. Sure, innovation could also be found in the US if people had a fast network to use, but in many cases they haven't. I think that Japan will become a leader in network usage in small, densely populated areas. That is nothing to scoff at. There may well be many business opportunities that can arise from having that level of expertise.
You are correct in saying that it could not be done in the US in a cost-effective manner. So what? It doesn't mean that it is not worth doing or that there will be no benefits. Perhaps it just means that those benefits will be of little use to Americans.
Re:Population density? Small land mass? (Score:5, Interesting)
You'll see it in US. In a global market, if Japan's strategy follows long term success, and US follows short term profits, not far from now (it's already happening btw, US economy is plunging down), Japanese telecoms will outgrow their own market, and their forward thinking would have earned them the cash to invest abroad.
How would you feel if Japanese companies build the US Internet infrastructure of tomorrow
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I'm entirely ambivalent - I'm a Brit! But I accept the point that you are making.
Do you smell that? Fresh bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)
You are spouting bullshit, very fine, very fresh and very pure bullshit.
Why? The city/state of New York and other such places in the US easily have a similar population density as Tokyo. Nobody is claiming that the many remote regions in Japan are as well serviced as its major cities.
But dumb people like you immidiatly take it as an excuse, oh the US has some remote locations therefore big population centers can't have fiber. This offcourse perfectly explains sweden, again a country with far better connections then the US AND a far lower population density. They are however not dumb americans and decided that they would install fast connections were people live.
You don't have to cover the US in fiber anymore then any other country has, just the places were lots of people live. In between these major cities you can KEEP the existing fiber that is already in place. So please tell me again what is so different about japanese cities compared to american cities that the japanese have rolled out that LAST mile of fiber and the americans are still on copper?
Because again if you weren't a dumb american you would know that the US has a fiber network, this story is about the last mile.
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Similarly, you might realize that last mile fiber is being rolled out in the US. I don't currently subscribe to it, because I'm satisfied with my current cable connection.
Another reason for a large percentage (not most, mind you) of the US still being on copper? Because our POTS system is/was so good (and cheap), a lot of people see no need to upgrade. I have neighbors like this
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Fiber is being rolled out in the US, but only for markets not serviced by AT&T. The problem with broadband in the U.S. is essentially focused on the sluggish, craptacular behemoth that is AT&T.
I don't know about that POTS system being cheap, either; in areas without proper internet connectivity (much of Michigan) POTS + Unlimited long distance runs about ~$90 a month, which is crazy.
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I should have specified, but I really meant cheap/good POTS in relation to local service. Which is what everyone used/uses for dialup internet service. Until very recently, a lot of countries local POTS service was per minute, not just long distance.
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Thanks for the condescending tone. It really helps your argument.
It lets me completely change the way I think about and use Internet connectivity.
So convince me. What can I not do today with a consistent, always on 5mb cable/DSL connection, that I could do with faster fiber at my house?
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(24Mb/s ADSL in London. Not available outside the bigger towns and cities in the UK, but that was the point of the discussion, right?)
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Which is of course, completely wrong... It's not the density that matters, it's how that density is distributed.
Sure, Swe
As said 1000 times NOT EVEN IN CITIES (Score:5, Insightful)
Furthermore I keep hearing this argument for, how many years now ? In the mean time many sparsely dense country like your northern neighbors get a better bit rate in both more dense and sparsely dense area...
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hmmm....not in the rural areas, not in the urban areas. So where IS FIOS available? In the somewhat less congested areas...suburban towns and cities. Why? Maybe easier deployment. Rewiring
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don't be stupid and think japan is a small place, it's actually quiet large, not your small island at all.
your also ignoring the fact many EU countries with less dense populations have better access then the USA. explain that one away genius.
Re:Population density? Small land mass? (Score:5, Informative)
Their infrastructure is a mess. It's old, it's outdated, and the scary thing is that nobody really has a firm grip on just how bad it is.
The Queens blackout last year was a prime example of this. It lasted almost two weeks, and Con Edison (NYC's public utility) didn't have any idea what was the main cause of it. Every time they patched the hole, another part of the system would fail catastrophically.
Earlier this year, a portion of 42nd street exploded, because a hundred-year-old steam pipe failed. The particular pipe had never been tested, and the steam system evidently does not have any sort of system to shut off the flow in the event of an explosive decompression.
Have you been on one of the Subways recently? How about Penn Station? NYC still doesn't have ATO on its subways, and uses an ancient interlocking system that forces the trains to run at wider intervals than they could. There was a fire a few years back in a room full of relays and other electrical equipment that dated back to the subway's original construction. It was feared that that line would be offline for years, as the only people who knew about the equipment in that room had been dead for decades, and there were no accurate or plans of how to rebuild the room.
They're currently in the process of building a new subway. One of the most expensive parts of the project is just going to be locating and moving existing infrastructure, because the city doesn't have a terribly good idea of what's buried underground, and moreover what's still being used and what's abandoned.
New York City was one of the last places on the planet where you could buy DC off of the grid. Many older buildings had lifts that were old enough to pre-date alternating current. It was finally discontinued last year, as DC power transmission is horrendously inefficient.
A few years ago, a lady was electrocuted after touching a metal streetpole. In the investigation that followed, Con Edison discovered hundreds of poles and metallic surfaces with hazardous levels of stray voltage in them, all in public places.
These examples pretty strongly support the hypothesis that New York's infrastructure is in a scary state. I'm not terribly surprised that the telecom systems aren't completely up to snuff -- they've got a host of other things to work on. NYC's infrastructure was hastily constructed in the early 20th century, and then neglected for the remainder of it. Now the money's finally in place, and something's being done about it, but it's still going to be a while before we see any tangible results. There are Verizon and ConEd trucks on every corner laying new cable -- just give it patience, and it'll eventually get done.
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A better example: If you see Kurt Russell, Ernest Borgnine and Adrienne Barbeau together, you'll *know* that NYC is in a scary state!
Re:Population density? Small land mass? (Score:5, Interesting)
The cost is the same as for ADSL in downtown Oslo.
BTW, Norway has a very sparse population, and this goes double for the mountain areas.
Terje
Re:Interesting tidbits in the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me a cynic, but... (Score:2)
It's well known that home cablemodem and ADSL service has low upload bandwidth. But even my workplace has only a 1.5MBps upstream connection. My webhosting account gives me around 500GB of disk space. Unfortunately even if I completely saturated my workplace's Internet, it would still take a couple of MONTHS to upload that much data.
Hmm... not to be suspicious or anything, but do you reckon that hosting services- particularly free ones- know this full well and take it into account when offering massive amounts of storage? :-)
Re:Interesting tidbits in the article (Score:4, Insightful)
But if 100Mbit class connection were cheap and you had one anyway (hey, it didn't cost much extra so why not), you might decide that you *did* care about offsite backups. If offsite is as painless as onsite, why not? It's like always-on connectivity was back in the era of dialup -- sure, no one needs it, but once you have it it changes the way you use the internet.
And I can think of plenty of things I'd like to do where higher bandwidth would be nice. Download Hi-def videos instead of renting them from the store (ignoring the difficulties with drm and what not for a minute). Better quality video on youtube. Something better than 64kbps for web radio broadcasts. Not just offsite backups, but offsite network-accessible home directories -- why can't I access my desktop the way I'm used to it on any computer I sit down at?
There's plenty of things to do with cheap fast bandwidth, and as it becomes available we'll discover what they are. It's a shame I can't buy a decent speed connection yet.
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Re:Interesting tidbits in the article (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to ask different questions, instead of "do users really need to connect via 100 Mbps?" you have to ask questions like "If an user will download 250 MB of program updates, how long will they want to wait just staring at the screen?" The answer is obviously that they don't want to wait *at all*. You might of course argue that you can install updates in the background, but that's kind of dodging the point.
I have a 2,33 GHz dual core processor. Do I need that much computing power 24/7? Of course not. I "need" it because of the peak output. If I start a program for example, I don't want to wait that one second more -- simply because it's annoying. Or when decompressing a 5 GB archive, I will need to wait a very significant amount of time, so there really would be an use for 100's of times faster processors and drives.
Another point is that even if the real "need" is somewhere around say, 20-30 Mbps, the extra bit doesn't do any harm. There really is no reason to artificially go down to the "real" need.
Re:One dimension (Score:5, Funny)
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*where it belongs, dammit!*