CUP-WINNING Hibs players won’t enjoy the same civic celebrations as city rivals Hearts after the club and the council failed to agree on a date.

The Lord Provost’s office offered selected dates to mark Hibs’ emphatic 5-1 League Cup victory over Kilmarnock in March, but they did not fit in with the club’s plans.

Now club officials have said that, with the new season weeks away, it is “time to move on”.

When Hearts beat Gretna in the Scottish Cup Final two seasons ago the Lord Provost led tributes to the Gorgie side at a civic reception at the City Chambers.

A smaller-scale celebration was held at the City Chambers following Hibs’ cup triumph in March, but plans for a formal reception hit the buffers due to the club’s Scottish Cup semi-final preparations and international call-ups involving a number of Hibs players.

A spokesman for Hibs said it was neither the club nor the council’s fault that the ceremony couldn’t go ahead.

He said: “The council tried to arrange something but unfortunately diaries couldn’t accommodate it at that time.

“They made an offer to us but our commitments made it impossible. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.

“We think that it is done and dusted as we’re now moving into a new season and we want to look ahead, not back to last year. The council was keen to arrange something and we do appreciate that, but it is time to move on.”

The office of new Lord Provost George Grubb wrote to the club last week to ask if it would restart discussions about arranging a date and said the club has yet to officially respond.

A city council spokesman said: “The council recognised Hibs’ excellent achievement at the ceremony held immediately after the cup final win. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to arrange a further celebration to date because of player commitments. However, we have written to Hibs inviting them to discuss the possibility of a civic reception.”

Frank Dougan, treasurer of the Hibernian Supporters Association, said: “It’s a shame it has taken so long for the council to come back to the club. It should have been done at the end of last season. Hibs are right to take the stance they have done. They might not say it publicly, but I think they’ll be disappointed that nothing was offered to them sooner.

“It doesn’t matter whether it’s Hibs or Hearts, a team that wins the cup should be honoured with a full civic reception because they have brought the spotlight on Edinburgh.”

Nevertheless, a Hibs team may yet grace the chambers with its presence after the city’s new sport leader, Councillor Deirdre Brock, put forward a motion asking for Hibs Ladies - who won their league and Scottish Cup double, winning all 22 of their league games in the process - to be invited to a civic ceremony. Hibs have now won both competitions three times in the past five seasons.

Paul Johnston, who manages the ladies side alongside brother Ian, said: “It is fantastic that the council is making the effort to recognise the work we have done over the last four or five years.”

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(08-30) 04:00 PDT Tokyo —

Americans invented the Internet, but the Japanese are running away with it.

Broadband service here is eight to 30 times as fast as in the United States - and considerably cheaper. Japan has the world’s fastest Internet connections, delivering more data at a lower cost than anywhere else, recent studies show.

Accelerating broadband speed in this country - as well as in South Korea and much of Europe - is pushing open doors to Internet innovation that are likely to remain closed for years to come in much of the United States.

The speed advantage allows the Japanese to watch broadcast-quality, full-screen television over the Internet, an experience that mocks the grainy, wallet-size images Americans endure.

Ultra-high-speed applications are being introduced for low-cost, high-definition teleconferencing, for telemedicine - which allows urban doctors to diagnose diseases from a distance - and for advanced telecommuting to help Japan meet its goal of doubling the number of people who work from home by 2010.

“For now and for at least the short term, these applications will be cheaper and probably better in Japan,” said Robert Pepper, senior managing director of global technology policy at Cisco Systems, the networking giant based in San Jose.

Japan has moved ahead of the United States on the wings of better wire and more aggressive government regulation, industry analysts say.

The copper wire used to hook up Japanese homes is newer and runs in shorter loops to telephone exchanges than in the United States. This is partly a matter of geography and demographics: Japan is relatively small, highly urbanized and densely populated. But better wire is also a legacy of American bombs, which razed much of urban Japan during World War II and led to a wholesale rewiring of the country.

In 2000, the Japanese government seized its advantage in wire. In sharp contrast to the Bush administration over the same time period, regulators here compelled big phone companies to open up wires to upstart Internet providers.

In short order, broadband exploded. At first, it used the same DSL technology that exists in the United States. But because of the better, shorter wire in Japan, DSL service here is much faster. Ten to 20 times as fast, according to Pepper, one of the world’s leading experts on broadband infrastructure.

Indeed, DSL in Japan is often five to 10 times as fast as what is widely offered by U.S. cable providers, generally viewed as the fastest American carriers. (Cable has not been much of a factor in Japan.)

Perhaps more important, competition in Japan gave a kick in the pants to Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp., once a government-controlled enterprise and still Japan’s largest phone company. With the help of government subsidies and tax breaks, NTT installed a nationwide network of fiber-optic lines to homes, making the lower-capacity copper wires obsolete.

“Obviously, without the competition, we would not have done all this at this pace,” said Hideki Ohmichi, NTT’s senior manager for public relations.

His company now offers speeds on fiber of up to 100 megabits per second - 17 times as fast as the top speed generally available from U.S. cable. About 8.8 million Japanese homes have fiber lines - roughly nine times the number in the United States.

The burgeoning optical fiber system is hurtling Japan into an Internet future that experts say Americans are unlikely to experience for at least several years.

Shoji Matsuya, director of diagnostic pathology at Kanto Medical Center in Tokyo, has tested an NTT telepathology system scheduled for nationwide use next spring.

It allows pathologists - using high-definition video and remote-controlled microscopes - to examine tissue samples from patients living in areas without access to major hospitals. Those patients need only find a clinic with the right microscope and an NTT fiber connection.

Japan’s leap forward, as the United States has lost ground among major industrialized countries in providing high-speed broadband connections, has frustrated many American high-tech innovators.

“The experience of the last seven years shows that sometimes you need a strong federal regulatory framework to ensure that competition happens in a way that is constructive,” said Vinton Cerf, a vice president at Mountain View’s Google Inc.

Japan’s lead in speed is worrisome because it will shift Internet innovation away from the United States, warns Cerf, who is widely credited with helping invent some of the Internet’s basic architecture.

As a champion of Japanese-style competition through regulation, Cerf supports network neutrality legislation pending in Congress. It would mandate that phone and cable companies treat all online traffic equally, without imposing higher tolls for certain content.

U.S. phone and cable companies, which control about 98 percent of the country’s broadband market, strongly oppose the proposed laws, saying they would discourage the huge investments needed to upgrade broadband speed.

Mayor Gavin Newsom’s high-profile effort to blanket San Francisco with a free wireless Internet network died Wednesday when provider EarthLink backed out of a proposed contract with the city.

The contract, which was three years in the making, had run into snags with the Board of Supervisors, but ultimately it was undone when Atlanta-based EarthLink announced Tuesday that it no longer believed providing citywide Wi-Fi was economically viable for the company.

Newsom blamed the Board of Supervisors for not acting quickly enough to approve the contract that he said was the best deal any big city had negotiated.

“I’m disappointed because we had a chance to get it done, and it didn’t happen,” Newsom said. “The board delayed it, and now EarthLink could not be more pleased.”

Newsom said he did not see any benefit in the deal collapsing even though EarthLink appears to be in financial straits and has an uncertain future.

The company announced Tuesday that it will slash 900 jobs - about half its workforce - and close offices in San Francisco and several other cities as a result of stiff competition from other Internet service providers.

“EarthLink would have been legally obligated to fulfill its promises to San Francisco, and we would have had a functioning Wi-Fi system by now,” Newsom said.

EarthLink spokesman Jerry Grasso said that EarthLink was willing to work with San Francisco but had decided that it “was not willing to work in the business model where EarthLink fronts all the money to build, own and operate the network.”

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said that Newsom should be “relieved” that the contract was not finalized and defended the board, saying that it had saved the city from being stuck with a questionable network and company.

“The mayor should be extremely thankful that the board was so investigative and thorough in its review,” Mirkarimi said. “EarthLink’s meltdown confirms our concerns that the risks outweighed the benefits.”

In January, the city agreed to a deal in which EarthLink would have paid the city $2 million for the right to build, install and run a free Wi-Fi network and to partner with Google to provide Internet service. People could have paid $20 per month for a faster connection.

But the proposed contract stalled at the Board of Supervisors, whose approval was needed for the transaction to go forward.

Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin proposed changes to the contract that would have increased the minimum connection speed of the free service, require additional privacy protections and reduce the duration of the contract from 16 to eight years.

The board had expected a response to those changes from EarthLink soon.

The city started negotiating the Wi-Fi agreement when EarthLink was under the leadership of Chief Executive Garry Betty. Betty, who died earlier this year after a battle with cancer, saw municipal Wi-Fi as a way to free EarthLink from the cost of using other companies’ networks.

Rolla Huff, who became the company’s CEO in June, said in recent months that the company was re-evaluating its approach to providing Wi-Fi in cities because the practice was not providing an acceptable rate of return.

EarthLink’s nascent municipal wireless projects in Philadelphia and Anaheim so far have not produced expected profits.

On Aug. 3, Newsom and Peskin jointly submitted a last-minute ballot measure for the November election that would allow voters to say whether they support establishing free, wireless Internet access in San Francisco.

The measure would not be legally enforceable but was designed to rally public support for the proposal.

Peskin was on vacation and not available for comment Wednesday.

Newsom said the public response to the measure will help the city move forward with a new plan.

“We think a public-private partnership is the way to go, but we’re looking at new ways to do it. … We will benefit from the lessons we’ve learned so far and from what other cities are doing,” Newsom said.

E-mail Robert Selna at rselna@sfchroncicle.com.