Maybe because the U.S. along with Europe, Japan, S.Korea and some other countries already hit today's bandwidth limits, while the rest of the world is just catching up in this regard.

Although I'm a bit more optimistic about the possible application of Moore's law in communications. Some 20 years ago 9600bps seemed to be the physical limit for phone lines, and there was even proof for that based on physics. But see how many new protocols emerged since then. ADSL, for example, would have sounded like an alien technology 20 years ago, or take any high-speed wireless protocol in use nowadays. Essentially it's the same medium utilized by much, much faster protocols.

The U.S. is behind much of the world in bandwidth to the consumer. Are you talking about server bandwidth? I think consumer bandwidth is more relevant to Joel's essay.

I don't think the rest of the world is "catching up" with the U.S. They're simply going to jump over and skip ahead without having to deal with legacy systems...

they've passed us a while ago. we are the ones that need to do the catching up. go check out the speeds they are getting in japan, europe and the likes...

I know... I miss my 1 Gbit/s fibre to home connection...