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Dude, enough with the strawman arguments already. Are other countries which supposedly have superior connections really using all those fancy appliations you're talking about? Of course not! They're using them for porn, movies, and music. Your "obscene phone calls" analogy fails, since downloading pirated stuff is the *only* thing I can think of that we'd use such high speed connections for.

LOL - my analogy doesn't fail simply because you aren't able to think of other uses for high speed data connections besides piracy.

You haven't given me one application that is in use today that is dependent on a super-high-speed connection *and* benefits the economy. "Home automation"? You've got to be kidding me - nobody is doing that!

And the reason they're not doing that is because we don't have the bandwidth to make it happen. The point is that we're talking about future applications and their benefits to our economy 5, 10, 20 years down the line. Make electricity available to every home in the US, reliable and at sufficent power, and we see applications like vacuum cleaners, televisions, lighting, etc. developed to take advantage of the power infrastructure. Make high speed broad-band available to every home in the US, reliable and at a sufficient speed, and we will see thousands of applications developed to take advantage of this data infrastructure - many of which will be monetized and sources of employment for our children and grandchildren.

If a high speed, uniform, openly accessible data infrastructure is never made available anywhere in the world, you can continue to not miss what you've never had. But many other countries aren't following the US's lead in letting telcos and cable companies keep consumers on slow, overpriced, proprietary data feeds. Those countries will produce applications that we won't see in this country because our data infrastructure won't be able to support them - applications on which businesses are founded, people are employed, and taxes are paid.

That's why I'm so skeptical about these claims that we're "falling behind" - nobody ever gives me a *single* high-speed application that is so critical to the economy that we're falling behind other countries.

And no one could have described Google or Amazon to you when ARPAnet was being implemented at universities in the '70s and '80s, or when ISPs began rolling out dial-up Internet access in the '90s. For that matter, no one could have described a personal computer to you when homes in the US were being wired for electricity. We don't need to identify technologies of the future to recognize that they will require an infrastructure that we can build today.