How long did it take you to get to this ToT web page? Perhaps half a second? Perhaps as long as a second, if you're on DSL? (Stupid Qwest.) Perhaps even longer, if you're the Unabomber and live in a shanty in the mountains and still use a dial-up Internet connection. But still, I think we can all agree that that brief, momentary pause between your mouse click and when this page actually loaded was unacceptably, inexcusably long. Am I right?

The government of South Korea agrees. That's why, by the end of next year, South Korea has pledged to deliver 1 Gbps Internet speeds to every single household in the country. According to an in-depth write-up about this news in the New York Times, that would be about 200 times faster than the Internet speed enjoyed by most Americans.

Let's pause and think about that for a second. 1 Gbps stands for 1 GIGABYTE GIGABIT PER SECOND (fixed). In comparison, Americans typically access the Internet at around 2 Mbps. In fact, here's a handy dandy chart from our pals over at Netflix that shows just exactly the kind of speeds we can expect from our plodding U.S. Internet providers.


As you can see, 1 Gbps isn't anywhere on this chart.

To put this discrepancy into perspective, it would be like Americans driving around at 70 miles per hour and South Koreans driving around at 100,000 mph. That's how much faster they're going to be accessing the Internet than us by next year. (Warning: I am not good at math.)

As an American, frankly I'm appalled. I mean, didn't we already beat the South Koreans during the Korean War in, like, 1890 or something? And didn't we win like four times as many medals as them in the recent Olympics in... where was it this time? Atlanta? Whatever.

The point is that America simply can't stand by and let South Koreans access pornography faster than we can. It's simply not right. It's OK if South Korea's national healthcare system is leaps and bounds beyond our own. It's OK if their children constantly outscore our own in every math and science test known to man. But it is simply deplorable that they can access UltraDonkey faster than we can.

Am I right? Come on, people! I think it's time to bring the super fast Internet back home where it belongs: here in the good old U.S. of A. Let the South Koreans have their kimchi and their Samsung and their Taekwondo, but give us the sub-millisecond access to YouPorn that we deserve.

Now, how can we speed up our domestic Internet connections? Anyone? Maybe I'll search Google for the answer--except that would probably take too long. Maybe I should go get some ice cream instead. Yup, that's it.

How fast do you need the Internet to go?