rtcvb32: I'd have to think, it's not quite as big of a problem for different reasons. Remember most of the problem in the US is brought up by the boom of Smart Phones, so it's cell phone carriers that have the biggest blockage there. But in Japan there's internet cafes all over the place, wifi hot spots that are probably public and shared, repeaters, etc. That means you have a few hundred feet that are supported by a single point and you aren't going to have 10 million users in that few hundred feet trying to access the internet. And those internet cafes will most likely have a land line so a big chunk of the data is removed from the equation.
Once again i'm not sure how accurate i am (
so take it with a grain of salt), but there's a lot of things that are more popular in other countries and not in the US. I've never heard of a karaoke room to rent for a few hours, yet in Japan (
at least in anime --.--) it's considerably more common. Also in Japan they have limited space so they probably will have a phone, and a laptop and few other electronics, so...
*shrugs* I'm assuming it also has something to do with the population and with the structure of the transmissions. The population in Japan is less than half in the US, so even if data consumption is bigger per user it probably is not as big as here. Then there are the points which you have made. And then there's also the way Japan industrialized after WWII. For example, Romania has the 5th best ranked internet speed in the world surpassed only by the likes of Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan, but this is because we have a population short of 20 million people and because internet is predominantly fibre optics, which makes the transit of information a lot faster. I'm assuming this technology must also be used in a lot of the internet cafes of Japan. However a country like Japan still surpassed Romania, which begs the question what are they doing better? Especially since they use more data, or so I assume.
