Oh dear. As I was poking around in my own blog looking for wisdom about Microsoft Access, what should I find but this post, entitled U.S. Loosing Edge in Broadband.

The post was from June of 2005. Yikes. Clearly, “we” haven’t made the case in the U.S. for extensive broadband. However, a recent video from PBS does a really nice job describing what is going on in other parts of the world.

Video Link at: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/culture/video-high-fiber/9263/

Plus the original link to the article in Foreign Affairs works fine.

The interviews, in fluent idiomatic English, by non-native speakers, were sobering.

While we in the U.S. are fighting three unnecessary wars, agonizing about how to pay for health care, fighting culture wars over things like the president’s birth certificate, and expressing outrage that we are paying one-third what Europe is paying for gasoline, other first-and second-world nations are eating our lunch in terms of preparing for the economic future in which our children and grandchildren will be living.

P.S. There is a lively discussion in the comments section on the PBS link. And they cited a Harvard study:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.law.harvard.edu/files/Berkman_Center_Broadband_Final_Report_15Feb2010.pdf