I attended the session yesterday at the Technology Essentials 2010, "Funding for Broadband: Indiana & Beyond". One of the things mentioned was the FCC's National Broadband Proposal was that 768 Kbps was the minimum threshold to qualify as broadband. I realize, that, for areas that only have dial-up or only very expensive access to higher rates, 768 Kbps would be a huge improvement. Unfortunately, for many libraries, even ALAs recommended 1.5 Mbps is way too low. I realize that there are many factors that limit the expansion of broadband in such a large country as the U.S. But many other countries offer far superior broadband speeds (see
http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20090826/cwa/). I was interested to see this article, "Google Set to Showcase Fast Internet" (
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/technology/companies/11google.html). I'm not sure how close to the 1 Gbps the end user would see, but, wow, 1 Gbps! Now that's broadband ;-)
