In Japan, competition and support from government policies have made broadband service the least expensive in the world at 18 cents per 100kbits/second, as compared with $2.86 in the U.S. and $7.18 in the United Kingdom. FTTH has about 85,000 new subscribers each month. In Japan, says an analyst, no consumer would be satisfied with the 1.5Mbit/second-3Mbit/second limit in the U.S. The business model in Japan is based merely on providing high-speed access. FTTH is seen as a way to move beyond the competition, which in Japan is digital subscriber line (DSL). DSL is a strong competitor, but is regarded as unfairly deployed in Japan, since subscribers further away from the central office receive less bandwidth and only those closest to the CO get the full 40Mbit/second speeds. To further increase broadband performance, the Japanese government has mandated a move from BPON to GE-PON architecture, and all future deployments will be based on GE-PON, which is less expensive, provides more bandwidth, and is recommended for video service in the future. In the U.S., GE-PON is known as Ethernet PON (EPON), but U.S. carriers are also leaning in the direction of Gigabit PON (GPON), which is an extension of BPON currently under development by ITU. Among topics covered are the services offered by NTT, Yahoo! Broadband, and Wave7. Suggestions for knowledge that U.S. service providers can gain from the experiences of FTTP deployers in Japan were offered at the FTTH conference in September 2004 and are described.