Quote:
Originally Posted by spongebobiwan
From what I have gathered, the good ole USA is quite far behind most places in Europe and many other parts of the developed world (i.e. Japan). My understanding is, that 20gbps is very commonplace speed in most of Europe, while 40gbps is common in Japan. I am currenly on 10gbps, soon to be upgraded to 16gbps, and that's about as fast as you can get in the USA for the most part.
I'm thinking that the main reason for this must be the fact that so much fiber optic cable has already been laid in Europe and other places, while in the USA there is such a vast amount of the old cable, the task of replacing all of this with fiber is daunting.
Another thing I've noticed (and probably for the same reasons) is that cellphone technology in the USA is also far behind Europe and other places. Where video conferencing with cellphones is quite commonplace for them from what I understand, here in the USA video conferencing is very limited.
Perhaps somebody more knowledgeable then myself can add their 2 cents to this topic.
All in all, the concept of the GRID, is really very appealing and and I think that it will develop as quickly as cable companies adapt to it. My guess is that this development may be quite different from one location to another (again, i.e. Europe vs. USA).
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You're close to the reason we're behind, but didn't hit the bullseye.
The real reason the USA is lacking behind in communication technology is because of its geographical properties. The US has what, around 300 million people living here? I want to say Japan has around half of that. Now take living space. The USA is around 3.7 million square miles of land. Japan isn't even 150,000 square miles (California is bigger).
That vast difference in size is why we fall behind. It takes so much more money and resources to work nationally on the US than it takes anywhere else. Japan is a nice paced island so its easy to keeps its infrastructure up to date. This is a nightmare in the US because of how spread out the cities are. At most you could keep the metropolitan areas up date but you would end up with something that looks like the current 3G network, just a small portion of the country is covered with it.