how can the interent be sooo quick?

[gioannou]

You guys are soooooo lucky
Here in Greece it's still Middle Ages...
The fastest ADSL for home use is currently 1Mbp/s!
I just installed my SUPER DUPER high speed ADSL at home at 512...
And i'm so happy
At least if u are a student(not for me anymore )u can reach something more satisfactory

[judge john]

i understand that, it just happens that uni networks are stupidly good .
but it was only 2 years ago that i upgraded to 1mb at home and that was as fast as you could get on ADSL(main BB for UK). and now 2MB is the basic speed for almost all ISP's with a lot of them upgrading to between 8mb-24mb for free. so while the UK lagged behind for a long time it's amazed me how quick it's catching up as the entire network is upgraded. so maybe it will something similar for you Gioannou and this time next year you will be at 10mb or so.
on a slight side note what is the average connection speed in the US? i know that in the UK at the moment it's 2MB and ever increasing, should be 8mb in the not so distant future. i have a lot of friends in the US and the average tends to be around 7-8mb with most people. is that the case?

[SuperSparks]

Wait until "Internet 2" becomes widespread - it promises some amazing speeds

http://www.internet2.edu/

http://lsr.internet2.edu/

[usil]

That sounds the like the sequel to a bad B movie Nick

I remember reading a while ago that South Korea was providing XDSL (I think it was VDSL, very high DSL) which was up to 45mbps as their regular DSL lines to customers. They are leap years ahead there.

[Tuttle]

The only issue with things like VDSL is the distance limits -- VDSL is only workable up to about a kilometre from the telco's DSLAM. That's great in an area as densely populated as Korea, but it doesn't work in the general case.

[Herring]

I'm just happy to have a 128 KB/s connection as opposed to the 46,600 bps that we had before. I'm about 5 km away from the DSLAM, so on the fringe of DSL availability. In a country the size of Canada, as soon as you get away from the major centres it's an expensive enterprise to lay all that cable...
Some locals have been pretty creative in getting high speed to their places. Like paying someone DSL service and installing a wireless system that beams to their places across the river (1km instead of 12 km of phone line).
Not sure of all the details but it works for them.