Fibre-optics don't help: Study

The study found that while there were economic benefits in having ADSL rather than dial-up, there was little extra value in faster forms such as fibre-optic cable.

via theage.com.au

This seems fairly short-sighted. When everyone was on dialup, there wouldn’t have been much advantage to having a DSL connection because there were no applications designed to take advantage of the speed. Same thing now - so few people have very high-bandwidth connections (at least here in A/NZ), there are few applications pitched to those people. Once faster connections are more wide-spread, more applications will be designed for them, thereby increasing the economic benefits of having such a connection.