These articles never take into account the cost of laying fiber, equipment, etc, etc to move those bits. The US has some incredibly sparse population in certain areas. Compare to the population densities of Europe/Asia.

Of course, my father, living on a farm 18 miles from the closest grocery store just had fiber turned up (connected).

There are many gov't programs set up to pay for this. Check you bill sometime (cell, phone, internet) those taxes go to equal access, etc.

Obama and congress have an additional program to subsidize broadband to under served areas. http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/More-Details-On-Obama-6-B...

And yes, we are mapping are fiber, trying to figure out where it all is. The gov't wants to find out how much capacity is out there so they have a base to figure out the improvement in capacity.

*Disclosure: I work for a telecom (of sorts).

_Over the past year, hopes have risen among Americans that something might finally be done about the third-world quality of their internet access._

As a third-world citizen, the author doesn't have any idea about the network quality their. I live in North Africa and it's only few weeks ago that we got a new 3G operator (Orange) in the country and it's only powering main cities. The fastest connection you can get is 8 MegaBit (whatever place you live in) and it's only recently that it was boosted from the 4M speed.

The quality is hilarious, you get sometimes a 3 days down time. You probably never reach the promised speed and in rush hours, you can do a coffee with friends instead. The 8MB connection costs around $60 a month; 3G promises 1MB speed at around $20 a month.

I think part of the problem is that there aren't enough people who want a really fast internet connection. Verizon's FiOS subscription rate is about 10% even though it's significantly faster in both directions than almost all alternatives. If the subscription rate were high enough Verizon would definitely lay more fiber, but right now there doesn't seem to be enough demand.

tl;dr: The US is behind because the regulatory environment encourages duopolies instead of fierce competition like in Europe or Asia.

> "Others have achieved something similar by having an independent authority build and maintain the network and then leasing access to all and sundry."

Brigham City, Utah (about an hour north of Salt Lake) recently voted for this in their community. The city is building fiber to every home, and broadband providers can compete for customers while leasing the infrastructure from the city.

Broadband in the US may not be as awesome as it is elsewhere, but to call it third-world quality? It's a big stretch.

What on earth does someone do with a 100 megabit connection? (Answer: For one thing, to avoid bankrupting the provider, you don't use it.) I remember going from a modem to 768 kbs and thinking, "That's as fast as you could possibly need." As a heavy user, comparing that with faster connections, I know I was right.

It's actually latency that counts, and that runs up against the speed of light.

For me it's the lack of uplink speed that drives me insane. As heavily data driven as we've become with 22megapixel digital cameras, HD video cameras, and then just our normal backup requirements, I would be happy with 100mbps up, and 2mbps down.