>> The technology to access the Internet at gigabits per second already
>> exists. The problem is that it will cost a fortune to dig up the entire
>> country to lay hundreds of thousands of miles of fiber. Which is why
>> nobody is doing this. (Or at least, not very fast.)
>
> Nobody except everyone. There were guys from the telephone company in my
> backyard a few weeks ago installing fibre optic cables on the telephost
> posts. The tv cable has been fibre optics from the get go, when the
> neighborhood was built 6 years ago.

Like I said, "not very fast".

> A few yearsa go, the carriers only installe dit when some cities would
> require "fibre to the home" for any new development, but now customers
> are asking for it, so they have no choice, or irsk losing those
> customers to the competition.

Maybe in your country. Over here, most people don't even realise that 
it's /possible/ to have fiber to your house. (Or that this would be 
beneficial somehow.) Like I said, BT is currently heavily pushing it's 
"Infinity" product, which is basically fiber to the kerb, giving a 10x 
speed boost. Not 200x, just 10x. And it's not cheap. And it's not 
available in 80% of the country. And it won't be available for years...

>> They're talking about 200x more speed. That's epic, right there.
>
> Yeah, moving from cat 3 copper wies to fibre optics will do that!

Well, you say that... My employer has a dedicated fiber connection, and 
it has a maximum speed of 10 mbit/sec. (We actually pay for 5mbit/sec. 
Costs about £30,000/year, IIRC. Then again, that's because we get 
business-grade reliability guarantees...)

>> Internet access is a little different. All Hotmail had to do was
>> /literally/ press a button and everybody got a 500x storage limit
>> increase. You can't do that with bandwidth.
>
> Sure they can. They've been offering HDTV signals over wire for the past
> 5 years, this means the infrastructure is there to support that bandwith.

I don't know about you, but we receive out HDTV signals over the 
airwaves, not over copper.

> The same thing happened 20 years ago when cable providers decided to
> become internet providers since they already had enough bandwidth to
> send 60 to 80 tv channels to every home... using one for data signals
> was not a problem at all.
>
> This forced the phone companies to massively upgrade their networks to
> support faster and faster aDSL services.

I don't even know what "cable" is.

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