is anyone else having trouble connecting to PSN? I can't even sign in, it says connection to network could not be established, but the wireless is working on my laptop so idk what the deal is.

Well, I don't know if Google will ever go to your town.  But someone else will - and because fibre, once it is down, is so much easier to upgrade and less prone to interference, you could have might much higher bandwidths that you have today.  The pressure from Google with force Verizion, Comcast, Time Warner, ATT and others to improve their services and expand or get rid of caps.  (Data caps are just a way for them to make money.)

As far as commercials.  We have them already on many services: Hulu Plus and Crackle, have commercials while Zune, Amazon Video, and Netflix all do not - and you can fast-forward, rewind, skip head to your heart's desire.  Even Netflix has 5.1 surround now, and Zune always did at 1080P (if you have enough data speed.) You often can get Some extras, but yes, that is sometimes and advantage of a disc.

   My buddy can come over - we log into his account, and we can watch from his entire purchased library.  Nothing to carry, nothing to break or get scratched.  It is super convenient.

Please. It works in your head. But that isn't how it works in the real world. Time Warner has a monoploy in Brooklyn, NY. Barley ever improves their service. They block all other companies to installing their service lines in my area. By the time NYC can even pay, and install fiber optics. I'll be a old man.

Same as Archer said, the cable company has a firm hold over their own cable and are not willing to share unless the government jumps in. The streets have to be dug up for fibre, it's estimated at 12 to 14 billion dollars to do this for the whole of Ontario. Fibre penetration atm is just 2%. By the time it becomes commercially viable for a private company to bring fibre out here I'll have grand children.

Netflix is probably better in the states but here 5.1 (at heavily compressed DD) is a rarity. So are HD versions and even those only run at 5mbps at max. Only Zune offers 10-12gb downloads for some movies, still only 10mbps. In comparison a lossless DTS-HD MA sountrack already uses 5mbps on blu-ray, Akira's supurb lossless compressed soundtrack runs at 16mbps. Video can go up to 48mbps in bursts for action scenes. As a videophile digital downloads don't do it for me. I'll gladly sit for a minute to skip through commercials and wait for the mandatory screens to get the best version possible.
I don't expect quality to go up soon either. It's more likely to go down first as streaming becomes more popular. Same as with HDTV service, it started with crispy 1080p at 16-18mbps. Now we have 5 times as many hd channels, but 8-9mbps is considered high end and most channels operate at 3-4mbps to cram more through the same pipe. Without slow motion replays the Olympics would look better on analog over the air broadcast.

And you still can't lend your movies to your friends, unless you give them your login password. Plus they need a good internet connection and the correct equipment or app installed. Same problem as with blu-ray really.

In the end I still prefer a physical product over access to a server. Even if I had google fibre internet with full access to actual blu-ray masters I would still be buying blu-ray disks and looking forward to the possibility of movies released on HVD in the future.
I'll cave in when digital downloads exceed the quality of physical media. Fibre with access to the 500mbps 4K cinema version, yum.

Digital Downloads will fail badly in countries that place a cap on downloads like Australia.

I'm not Australian but I have friends in Australia. I think they have a cap of something like 10 gigs of data a month or something depending on what plan they are subscribed to.

If say Final Fantasy 16 comes out and its 100 gigs, they'd take 10 months to download that game.

Standards are changing all the time - and data-caps will be increased, dramatically, unless the providers can control their monopoly. (They are trying really hard to do that - which is why we need to support Net Neutrality.) Even the quality from 2 years ago has been dramatically improved. Imagine what will be in another 5 or so.

One of my buddies just announced yesterday that they upgraded their connection and now he gets 40 megabytes per second down. He was saying that it did help him a bit on Battlefield 3.

Y'all are making me sad with your slow connections. I do hope those of you stuck with lousy net speeds get some upgrades soon!

Here is an interesting chart of Internet Speeds. South Korea - usually first for years, is now 3rd. And the USA usually ranks around 18th, but on this list is 30th!

http://netindex.com/

How do you rank with your county? (I am above average at 16.89 vs 11.18.)

Unfortunately standards aren't always changing for the better. My internet was the fastest when I just got it and no caps. Then the rest of the neighbourhood caught on and it starting to drag during primetime. Then my internet provider introduced data caps.
Sure they have been working on making it faster and more stable but the data caps are still the same.

Canada is 32nd on that list. I get 10mbps at max from the average of 13.62.
I just checked speedtest.net, atm it gives me 1.19mbps down and 0.49mbps up (promised 10mbps down 0.5mbps up)
A different server gives me 2.68mbps down, same up. It all depends on the rest of the path, only some Steam downloads give me the full 10mbps.

It sucks having no competition to speak of. It leaves too much room open for shady deals. "Hey you can have 18mbps and 20gb extra a month if you opt into a contract and rent a modem for $7 a month (on top of $50 a month)" Wtf does my modem have to do with a data cap.
And when I bought this modem from my isp 5 years ago they said it could go upto 50mbps (their fastest plan at the time for $100 a month)