Photo: [F]oxymoron… a New York Times article by Randall Stross about how fast and cheap broadband access is in Hong Kong compared to the U.S.:
Hong Kong residents can enjoy astoundingly fast broadband at an astoundingly low price. It became available last year, when a scrappy company called Hong Kong Broadband Network introduced a new option for its fiber-to-the-home service: a speed of 1,000 megabits a second — known as a “gig” — for less than $26 a month.
In the United States, we don’t have anything close to that. But we could. And we should.
Verizon, the nation’s leading provider of fiber-to-the-home service, doesn’t offer a gig, or even half that speed. Instead, it markets a “fastest” service that is only 50 megabits a second for downloading and 20 megabits a second for uploading. It costs $144.99 a month. That’s one-twentieth the speed of Hong Kong Broadband’s service for downloading, for more than five times the price.
I wonder how Hong Kong does with cell-phone fidelity — which, as I’ve noted before, can be so poor in the U.S. that it would seem a market exists for carriers to offer a “premium” cell-phone plan.
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