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It's ironic how the US started the big trend for the internet, but fell into last place (for a first world country) in terms of the quality of their broadband.  The typical we hear is that the logistics in terms of the sheer size of the US has prevented the rapid expansion of broadband.

While that is a legitimate excuse as far as general cost go, I feel that there's another area of blame we can examine: limited selection of ISPs.

In Japan, most notably the larger cities like Tokyo, the broadband has been excellent.  Dial-up never took off due to the high cost per minute of usage.  However, the small area allowed for  companies to easily install fiber lines to homes.  But there's an important thing to note here.  It is true that NTT holds a huge dominance in Japan, but the proliferation of ISPs helped increase competition and drive the prices down.  Add to the fact that fiber became a reality for many homes and you had a very competitive market with excellent service.

America is suffering from lack of competition since we've got a few really crappy, lazy, bureaucratic and greedy monopolies going on.  Recently, I looked at other options for internet in my area and only  found that I could install an ADSL line with 3-6 mbps upload max.  Compare that to my Flets ADSL in Japan, which gave me in the upwards of 100 mbps and I find myself crying.

And what's worse is that the ISPs here have awful service.  Try calling Time Warner and see how long they keep you on hold.  They must have one service representative per one hundred users at best!

This really blows considering how much you pay for crappy service.  And now these companies want to start throttling customers here.  This is really sad because they know there isn't any competition.

No wonder the rest of the world is kicking America's ass.  America has been spending more money on useless wars than on internal infrastructure to make itself competitive.  And they let these big dawg corporations get away with monopolistic murder.