I notice that in the UK Bulldog Broadband offers 8Mb/s DSL for 20
> pounds per month, for the life of your contract, and is starting to
> deploy 20Mb/s ADSL+2 service (no price quoted).
> Here in the States, Verizon offers a max 3Mb/s service for $30 per
> month (after $20 per month for the first three months). And if you're
> lucky and you're in one of the areas where they're deploying FIOS, you
> can get 5Mb/s for $36 per month (which seems to be a drop from the
> $40/mo I remember seeing the last time I looked).
> Could it be the competition created by the US government's rulings to
> give incumbent phone providers exclusive access to their networks?
This was discussed briefly on another newsgroup and a fellow from London talked about how exchanges seemed to be a mile or so apart, many much less. Which would make it MUCH easier to offer high speed broadband. We didn't discuss the why but maybe they built them that close after WWII took out a lot of the infrastructure. Or maybe that was all they could drive the signals 100 years ago and now they get a totally unplanned benefit.