Japanese Online Connectivity Ahead of EU/US

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."'"

Comments

Interesting tidbits in the article

[heinousjay]

I found it very telling that they had a bunch of theoretical uses for all the bandwidth, and one actual case - a clueless EverQuest player who somehow thinks having a 100 megabit connection helps. Sure, they have super fast Internet. The big question right now is "so what?"

I suppose eventually some sort of service will take off that makes it worthwhile, but for now, it's just not happening.

Re:Interesting tidbits in the article

[heinousjay]

Actually, no, I've never tried that. It's just nothing something I personally care about doing. I back up onsite, and if I need something available, I make it so from my home servers. Sure, the bandwidth isn't great, but I get about 2Mbps out so it's not that bad, either.

I'm sure people can throw me all sorts of one-offs and corner cases for things they'd like to do, and they're all legitimate and should probably be served, but they're also not all that interesting for the general population. This is a terrible place for me to make my argument, being that we're nearly all enthusiasts here, but honestly, super fast access isn't really a priority for most people.