Lets not forget Japan's love of new technology, they are truly some of the leaders in digital/technological living/advancement or though some of it is hardly desirable.
In the UK "Fibre to the kerb" isn't worth the effort or cost given what revenues are actually generated by domestic telephony and data services. In rural areas in particular it can be assumed that uptake of services would be similar to present and that fibre installation would be completely un-cost effective.
For that reason as much as we would all love to have a fast broadband connection and low contention, its not going to happen for the foreseeable future. Its not just the cost of the installation but also new equipment, retraining etc.
Whilst we might not get fibre, it seems that ADSL2+ could be a step in the right direction for making even more use of our existing copper orientated infrastructure, with a certain percentage of poeple perhaps reaching around 24Mbps or similar.
ADSL2+ should hopefully start to materialise after BT upgrade the core network to 21CN (21st century network) - which will replace legacy comms systems with new IP based infrastructure, hopfefully by around 2008.