*sighs*
Try working out the cost of supplying infrastructure to a few hundred people in a single building, or spread over a few hundred yards on a single road.
Then try working out the same infrastructure spread over several miles.
The Japanese system largely works because it's much cheaper to supply it in the manner they do, in very high population densities than it is to supply it over traditional (individual) phone lines or co-ax cable, and it isn't generally available at such speeds or at low costs outside the major cities.
You cannot easily compare supplying services in a city like Tokyo to even most of London - it costs less for an ISP/Telecom company in Tokyo to supply a very high capacity fibre line to a building than it would for them to supply enough individual phone lines for even a medium office block/residential complex (IIRC what they've taken to doing is running a couple of fibre lines to new buildings, then putting what is basically a mini exchange in the basement).
From what I understand, we're actually ahead of many countries (including the US) in terms of what we can get across the country as a whole, and the costs/options we've got.
Anyway back on topic, as someone who has had an internet connection from the days when you paid for the phone call (in addition to the cost of the ISP plan), and had disconnections every X hours, then moved onto BB I've always taken "unlimited" to mean "unlimited connection" which is exactly what we've got now.
We can remain connected, and get a workable connection for practically unlimited usage - the speed is the thing that varies (5-20mb, which is still a huge improvement on what I originally signed up for, especially as it now costs less than what I started with for 10-40x the speed).
hohoho.