Re:Um, there's a reason they're doing this: (Score 1)

Nobody lives in most of these valleys. And quite a lot of them dead end. Yes they have suspension bridges, but a lot of these ravines have no easy access to the bottom. It's difficult to explain unless you actually see it, but it makes sense for the lay of the land and where they are trying to get the cables to. In fact, in a lot of cases, people don't want to build in the valleys because of the floods, or because the towns are hot spring resorts, and they go where the water comes out, not in the valleys. I've seen plenty of suspension bridges in Japan, but these are places where people are trying to get cables to go UP and OVER, which you don't generally do with a suspension bridge. What happens is they are switchbacking across the face of a steep incline, many times over a ravine that cuts through the middle of it. It's not so much a valley as a dead end, box-ravine at an incline. As for a place being remote, I don't see your point. You can split hairs all you want, but it was about as remote as you can be and still be within 200km of Tokyo. It takes about 5 hours to get there, and it is packed into a ravine in the mountains that dead ends in a blank wall. Use whatever word you want to describe it, but it was remote as hell, and the steep mountains blocked out most of the sunlight. The point I was making is that to get wired service to these people would be extremely difficult and costly, as opposed to a satelite dish up on the top of the ravine, with a single cable down into the town's NTT exchange offering 10mbps. The best these people get is probably 56k. They might have ISDN (128k). BTW, you are a flocinaucinihilipilificator. Remote: difficult to get to. In this case the reason being the steep valley walls. Those same walls block out the sun.....hm.......think about it.