The Need for Speed: Why is the United States still waiting for the future to download?

[Commentary] For the United States to catch up in broadband, we need to figure out a way to get fiber lines all the way to our homes, instead of just to switching stations, where the information is then transferred to slow copper wires to get to us. There are four existing options for doing this:

1) Massively subsidizing the existing providers is the Asian model,

2) Creating competition is, in general, the way the Europeans have built their networks, and there are some great ideas that can be taken from the other side of the Atlantic,

3) Let customers own their own fiber connections instead of leasing them from the telecom companies, and

4) The government provides broadband itself, as Australia has recently announced.

All these solutions would require massive government investment. But it's time for the country to stop thinking of high-speed Internet access as a useful luxury. Instead, we should consider it a crucial part of the infrastructure of the twenty-first century. And in the race to reap the benefits from this infrastructure, the United States has fallen abysmally behind, and only truly big and creative thinking will help the nation catch up.