Unfortunately, the article completely ignores the geographic realities or the United States and Japan.<p>First, Japan's population density is orders of magnitude greater than that of the United States. It's going to cost less to deliver high-speed internet when people live closer together. Likewise, Japan is a smaller country. That 160Mbps is not the speed you're going to get traveling over underseas cables to North America. That's the speed you'll get for servers located within Japan.<p>Backbone connections are going to cost more to create in the United States simply because Americans are as likely to access a server across the continent as they are within 100 miles of them. Where you can essentially create a backbone in Japan with a under 1,000mi of fiber, in the US you'd need 20x that amount or more.<p>Those are stark differences. I mean, it wouldn't be too hard for an ISP to provide faster connectivity from Boston to Philly where populations are dense for sites hosted in that area, but that wouldn't be helpful to users - since most of the time I'm not connecting to servers hosted within eastern Mass, RI, CT, the NYC metro area or Jersey. In fact, I'd say that most of the time I'm connecting to Texas or California.<p>Can we stop comparing Apples and Oranges? The US can never have broadband like Japan and it's not because of corporations or government or any sort of conspiracy. Maybe those things could offer <i>marginal</i> improvements (seeing our service go from 6Mbps to 10-15Mbps), but we simply won't have service like Japan will since we don't locate ourselves close to the servers we want to access or to each other.