My Time-Warner / Road Runner Internet service here is your typical “high-speed” cable connection found in the U.S. — 6 megabits down and half a megabit up. It’s up pretty reliably although Road Runner has some router problems that cause portions of the Internet to be unreachable to me, and I am unreachable to them. Road Runner denies that it’s their problem even though their own upstream / backbone provider points the finger at them as well as every routing expert I’ve spoken with and shown the traceroutes to. But that’s another issue. It’s the speed I’m talking about. Long ago, 6 megabits seemed fast. And it is fast compared to 110 baud that I used in 1972.

I recently spoke with a friend in Sweden. He has your average Internet connection in Sweden, for which he pays $15 a month. But he gets 100 megabits up and 100 megabits down with no limits! Last month he uploaded nearly 5 terabytes of data. (That’s Terabytes, with a “T”, 5,000 gigabytes.)

We’re living in the technological Third-World here in the United States.