http://www-tc.pbs.org/video/media/swf/PBSPlayer.swf?width=512&height=288&video=1923261274&player=viral&start=1545000&lr_admap=in:pbs:0
I dunno, I see this mentioned all the time, but then in reality it doesn't pan out. I guess unless you look at the cost side of it, we certainly can't get internet in the US for $6/mo that's for sure. But I'm two tiers down from the top level, and this is what I get speed-wise;
(http://results.speedtest.comcast.net/result/72597492.png)
To eliminate comcast's speedboost scam from interfering with the testing, here is a sustained 50MB download;
(http://testmy.net/KIdNyqL.png)
Not to be an ass, but I was watching that video where the guy in Amsterdam is on all-fibre and downloading a 70MB file and I was thinking "crap that's slow." I have a friend in NYC who bitches about the internet all the time, he can't even stream movies without 10 minutes of buffering. I think that one thing, NYC's crappy internet service, is behind most of the kvetching you hear about the U.S. being so far behind...since that's where the largest concentration of journalists resides.
But the large sized cities in FL and CA, actually most of the southeast really, have ridiculous internet. You can get FIOS in certain parts of JAX, which is the same price, but instead of Crapcast's throttled upload speeds you get a symmetrical connection. Even that is going away soon, though, to compete with Verizon the shmucks at Crapcast finally decided to roll out upstream channel bonding, which should hit JAX in the next few months. Then, presumably, they will revise their plans to be symmetrical or at least closer to it. The only company that truly sucks speed-wise is AT&T, they haven't invested in their network in a loooooong time and copper-based connections get painfully slow depending on your distance from their building, which is generally pretty large.
Of course, a real gripe is that with crapcast's 250GB monthly cap, all this means is that I could literally blow through my whole cap in less than half a day. But they will have to lift that as more people start watching video content exclusively over the web. Or at least I hope. Comcast sucks, but their product doesn't. I haven't heard anybody bitching about caps in europe, I don't think they have them.