Are there any HN'ers (patio?) who live in Japan and could shed some light on what you actually use all this bandwidth for, if you do? Is the current situation really as it's painted?

I'm in the UK and I current have a (fairly flakey) 24Mbps ADSL2+ connection and I can see running everything like TV, radio, music, voice, etc via this connection. I would do this more if it was more reliable - and I already download a lot of video and stream music via last.fm, use skype, etc... I can see myself using maybe 5-10x my current bandwidth quite happily but not really knowing what to do with anything on top of that.

Obviously while it was novel you'd just gleefully 'download the whole internet' because you could, but what then? Apart from bigger, better, faster, HD/HiFi versions of current applications, what do you (or would you) use a really fast connection for, in the long term?

How do people in Japan use their current 1 Gbps connections today? Are the ISPs making money or are they in some kind of government-subsidized fiber bubble?

1 Gbps is faster than a hard disk and 10 Gbps is faster than an SSD; this could change app design.

The size of the pipe going out of your house does not matter if the upstream routers do not have #users x max_bandwidth available as well. Seeing as how state of the art equipment does not have enough bandwidth on the backplane to support even a small neighborhood with connection speeds like this it seems that a better description of this endeavor would "waste of effort."

Meantime, we suck...

Thanks to BigTelcos