Several news stories have come out recently showing Japan, Korea, and China not only with more broadband deployments than the US, but faster growth as well. This is in spite of efforts by large providers like Verizon and AT&T to roll out new fiber projects like FIOS and U-Verse. Japan now tops 7 million fiber users and is having to upgrade backbones to over 40Gbit/s to maintain speed with 100Gbit/s on the horizon. The short of it is that our nation's telecommunications companies don't seem to have the will or vision to compete with other industrialized nations and maintain our edge, preferring to compete only with each other at our expense. Even when the service is semi-competitive on speed or features, the prices are significantly higher than what Koreans and Japanese enjoy. Now more than ever, we need market-leading fiber projects like UTOPIA to even the international scorecard.
(See full articles here, here, and here as well as more on U-Verse and information on SureWest pushing a 100% fiber network instead of a fiber/coax hybrid.)
