In a rather enlightening interview with Sony Computer Entertainment's CEO, Ken Kutaragi reveals how he feels about the state of Broadband solutions ...

NG: So you will offer a pure broadband experience at some point?

KK: Pure broadband at some kind of starting point -- 100MBps (megabits per second) or above. Right now, 1MBps is still broadband in the U.S. Current Ethernet has 100MBps peak bandwidth and cannot support TV-link vieo or game applications, and most PCs are still connecting with 56K modems, or so-called 1.5MBps broadband, which is equal to the speed of a CD-ROM [laughs] -- that's not broadband! Unfortuantely, much of America is backed up by this kind of infrastructure. What I'm saying is, the U.S. is a serious country for narrowband.

While this does show where Sony is coming from as an electronics powerhouse (talking about TV-like video over broadband, presumably using the PS2 as a trojan horse to deliver content), it also might illuminate why Nintendo is remaining so quiet about Internet plans.

Console broadband network apadters can support 100MBps, but there is no way to use them at those speeds except in a LAN (local area network) situation. Kutaragi clearly feels that even 100MBps isn't enough. But it doesn't matter if you support 100MBps, or even 10MBps if all you can achieve is 1MBps.

Later in the interview, he even drops the "fiber-optic wire" line ... another holy grail. Fiber can support speeds over 1GBps (1000 megabits per second) ... enough speed to deliver the kind of content that Kutaragi is talking about. But until there is an infrastructure in-place to support it, we're going to be stuck in a "narrowband" world.