Man America is behind the times I got a 100Mbps ceiling, although I rarely get above 35Mbps on test because there aren't enough subscribers on the line to keep it full of light at all times. My cost is aroung 6000 yen a month.
It's messed up, cell phone plans suck her and are great in America and hardly anyone uses them, here in Japan everyone uses them and the plans suck. In America everyone would use FTTH and the plans suck, here no one uses internet at all (fucking third world, and cell phone internet SUCKS!) and I get an awesome deal on FTTH. Oh well, I guess supply and demand dictates that things will always suck for consumers.
Well instead of gloating about one of the very few things that Japan has better than the US I'll try to address some of the questions about FTTH as I assume it'll be very similar in the US (as ADSL and XDSL etc are the same here as in the US).
They will run a fiber cable into your house, mine is thin and yellow an spooled up under my desk, it's not that fragile, but I wouldn't suggest jumping rope with it. It goes into a Fiber Modem that has a CAT6 cable running to my 10/100 regualr ethernet card. No fiber channel cards or anything like they use in actual fiber set ups in the business world. Fiber channel cards at the moment would be to cost prohibitive to any home based service. I have to use PPPoE to connect to my service, but that might be ISP specific and not typical of all FTTH providers. No big deal as it's easy to set up on OS X and fairly simple on XP.
But everyone should get fiber so that it spreads and is availble in my town when I get back to the States. I don't think I can go back to cable, it'd be like going back to dial-up after using dsl/cable.
