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Somebody please explain this to me. I hear a lot about the US "falling behind" because we don't have 100mbit lines to the house. Why is this exactly?

This is analogous to someone who has never had access to electricity in the home wondering what all the fuss is about. High speed data access throughout the US would mean a better, more powerful data infrastructure for future applications to be built on. Such future applications might include a replacement for our current telephone system with a visual communication system, real-time remote examinations by medical experts that a patient can't get to, home automation capable of reacting intelligently to emergency weather broadcasts, and a thousand other ideas we can't envision now that would be the seeds of future business successes, wealth creation, and the overall betterment of our lives.

Is downloading pirated movies and music faster really that necessary to the economy?

I can envision someone asking if obscene phone calls were really necessary to the economy when the idea of wiring homes for telephone was first tossed out.

I've had DSL for years and when I was in business it was the computer business so I'm familiar with the business benefits of high speed communications. An article like this generalizes too much and as usual there is too much "gloom and doom".

It's just another America {bad, slow, dumb, greedy, doomed, stupid, hated.... pick your own adjective} article. Ho-hum.

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.

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! "Visual communication"? It's been tried - 15 years ago! Nobody cares, nobody wants it. And how would it even benefit the economy? 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.