Here is one of the several reasons (albeit not one of the high ranking ones such as government action) why the Japanese are able to handily maintain their broadband penetration leadership over the US: the availability of great gear, often before other parts of the world (including - you guessed - countries such as the US and Canada, on the other side of the Pacific Ocean).  Case in point: the Yamaha RT57i (depicted on the figure).  My Brazilian Sansei friend Toshiro wrote me about this one (believe it or not, my native São Paulo had a huge influx of Japanese immigrants during the last century).  The Yamaha RT57i is a really cool broadband router.  What's nice about this NAT box is not only its support of IPv6 (the Japanese government is taking an active involvement in setting up good policies for the development of new technologies, and this IPv6 example was already brought up in a previous post here).  The true differentiator for the RT57i is its 2 RJ11 ports, which enable an end-user to plug in any analog phone and turn it into a SIP phone!  So 34440 Yen (approximately US$ 313, using the best price of a quick search in a popular Japanese comparison site and Yahoo! Finance's currency converter gets you analog to SIP conversion, ability to transverse a NAT and support of IPv6.  I tried to browse through other similar residential gateways geared towards the consumer market on our side of the Ocean, but I could not find any that would turn an analog phone into a SIP phone... perhaps a reader can prove me wrong (if so, please post! ;-) but for some strange reason nobody else had that bright idea over here.  I also asked Henry Sinnreich (distinguished scientist from MCI) about this (since he is regarded as one of the fathers of SIP, along with Henning Schulzrinne, from Columbia).  Henry is not only a brilliant scientist and ambassador of SIP, but also an experienced hacker who experiments with just about any hardware connected to SIP, VoIP, etc.  It turns out he already knew about the Yamaha box, but could not mention a similar device that would turn analog desktops into SIP phones (as of a couple of weeks ago, when I asked him about it).  Time for another harware manufacturer over here to do it!  Any takers?