Verizon posted a nifty little demo video (though apparently they’re not too good at embedding their own YouTube videos, what’s up with the broken span tag?) of their FiOS Internet connection running into some guy’s home at near 100Mbps speeds (actually 80-something). They then asked Om Malik, who has written in the past about the awful state of American broadband, to interview the man about his experience with such a fast connection. Malik asked some good questions, but the answers made it pretty clear: yeah it’s cool, but America is still nowhere near getting up to speed (literally) on high-speed broadband.

Yes, this guy got to test near 100Mbps Internet, but he’s one of only 2 people in the U.S. testing it, and of course he works for Verizon. When quizzed about how much a service like that could potentially cost, he gave the very careful: it’s still in testing with no plans to roll out to the public, answer. He did say his 15Mbps FiOS connection was $39.99 but that is with an employee discount, meaning for regular Joe and Jane it would probably be at or above $50 a month – pretty ridiculous when compared to the rest of the world in the fast lane.

Om Malik has some more observations on this on GigaOM, including how Verizon wants us to get excited about a service that is not even actually 100Mbps when in Sweden grandmas are getting 40Gbps (yes, that GIGAbits) and in Japan and Korea 100Mbps are now pretty commonplace. This very moment my Internet is running at a whopping 1.3Mbps – and I’d say that’s a very good day for it. It’s quite pathetic.

I hope that going forward a few of the Presidential candidates really jump on this issue, even if just for political gain. The Washington Post was already on it last week, and it’s finally getting people talking – as is Mark Cuban, who always gets people talking. Hopefully all of this will come to a head soon and cause some kind of shakeup from the stagnation we’re in. Either that or I’m moving to Sweden.