ed ILEC loops. 48 Toward Truly High-Speed Connections The regulatory controversy over wholesale unbundling and line sharing in the United States has obscured an important fact: U.S. "high-speed" con- nections are not very fast. A speed of 600 kilobits a second or even 1 megabit a second may seem a great deal faster than the speed of a sub- scriber's old dial-up modem, but the technology is much further along than this. Broadband service in Korea and Japan routinely performs at 8 megabits a second, or even higher. With a modern infrastructure and densely packed residential areas, these two countries are now sprinting ahead of the United States both in deployment and in quality of service. By The Broadband Revolution the time the United States succeeds in diffusing broadband to 30 or 40 per- cent of the population, these subscribers will probably be just as dissatisfied with their "high-speed" service as an earlier generation was with the dial- up worldwide-wait. What is the solution to this problem? At present, all signs point to direct fiber connections, or "fiber to the home" (FTTH), or at least fiber very close to the home. In Japan and Korea, fiber-optic capacity has been extended very close to the final subscriber. New apartment buildings in Korea are being wired with fiber optics that can deliver speeds of up to 100 megabits a second, and in Japan, the incumbent telephone company (NTT) is extending fiber to residences in densely populated areas (see the discussion of Japan and Korea in chapter 9). In the United States, such an investment program is now beginning, perhaps in response to the FCC's 2003 decision to end line sharing and reduce the wholesale regulation of fiber to the home. Why would households be interested in such high speeds if only 15-20 percent of them now subscribe to broadband? The answer lies in the applications that high speeds can handle (see table 8-2). Needless to say, it will be some time before most Americans can download video in real time from their current broadband connections, 