QOTD: How Fast is Your Net Connection?
Despite spending most of our time online and at the computer these days, a major bottle neck is the connection we use to gain access.
In North America, even though broadband is pretty much accessible everywhere, the overall infrastructure is really bogged down. Because we're running much of everything on aging equipment and underlying cabling, speeds are extremely limited.
Despite this, some companies are launching new fiber services, that offer incredible speeds. But even with fiber, we're still lagging behind countries like Japan. Many residents of Japan enjoy speeds of 100 Mbit/sec. or greater. When we see this, it's painfully obvious that our ISPs are totally taking us for a ride, and charging a hefty sum of money for it.
The skinny? U.S. and Canadian Internet users are getting ripped off.
The question of the day is: How fast is your Internet connection?
Those of you reading from more, "privileged" countries, spare us.

We need to lay another cable across the pacific again
I can play WOW without any trouble thank god!
I live in Romania.
I know that I'll be moving in the next few months, and it looks like FiOS is available in most of the apartments there. Only real advantage over cable is the upload speeds -- 2mbps versus cable's 768kbps. But I don't upload, so the extra 3mbps from FiOS (15mbps) is just an extra 25% bonus.
One last thing -- in the US we tend to have unrestricted download amounts. Comcast's 250GB/mo cap is one of the more notable, but still is an awful lot of data (on mere principles, I reject the notion of a 250GB/mo cap but that's another story). You'll find many of the superfast connections in other countries have pretty strict data limits, ones that you could exceed in a weekend of downloads. Just a general rule, though, I'm sure someone can find a non-US ISP with fast connections and 250GB/mo or higher data cap (or no cap!).
I'm running 5 down more like .5 up