Political Bloviation

This says a lot about the lack of effective regulation in the US:

Japan’s Warp-Speed Ride to Internet Future - washingtonpost.com
Perhaps more important, competition in Japan gave a kick in the pants to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp. (NTT), once a government-controlled enterprise and still Japan’s largest phone company. With the help of government subsidies and tax breaks, NTT launched a nationwide build-out of fiber-optic lines to homes, making the lower-capacity copper wires obsolete.

“Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace,” said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT’s senior manager for public relations.

His company now offers speeds on fiber of up to 100 megabits per second — 17 times as fast as the top speed generally available from U.S. cable. About 8.8 million Japanese homes have fiber lines — roughly nine times the number in the United States.

The burgeoning optical fiber system is hurtling Japan into an Internet future that experts say Americans are unlikely to experience for at least several years.

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