Actually, my speeds are about the same as those in Korea as I live in NYC. Which makes sense because South Korea is almost entirely urban much like NYC. It's not really fair to make cross country comparisons between countries with vastly different geographies.
> It's not really fair to make cross country comparisons between countries with vastly different geographies.
It's fairer than you'd think. There were some articles in the last few years (summarized at Ars Technica, I think) about how the US is really, really average at delivering residential network bandwidth at a decent cost, compared against a wide variety of countries.
The thing that struck me about it was that the countries in the comparisons varied a lot politically (highly regulated vs. largely free market, etc.) and in terms of varying population density. I think the main conclusion I drew was that there isn't really one simple explanation for why we're pretty mediocre at this. We just have a crappy system.
Out of curiosity, what provider and what advertised speeds and what speeds during actual use?
I'm not doubting your statement so much as just honestly curious, since getting access to the Internet in the US, from my experience, has been significantly worse than other places in the world where I've lived. In most of the EU, Asia, and in Russia, getting Internet was a breeze for my partner and I whenever we moved, and the speeds were usually, if not always, exactly as advertised.
For example, my partner and I live in Russia, and for some time, she did contract work as a chemist in Pereslavl, around 100 km north of Moscow. It was a remote and small town by any definition, but it had I believe 4 different internet providers and the options were all clearly laid out with simple pricing, and the pricing on the sites was the same as the pricing on our monthly bills.
Comparing this to when I've attempted to help friends prepare to move within the US and looking at ISPs, getting Internet in the US is a complete nightmare. The major ISPs often aren't able to give you an accurate pricing offer without first inputting an actual address onto their website, and very often the tool is broken or for whatever reason returns that the property is in the service area, even if the property already has a current connection from said ISP. (checking to ensure my parent's were getting a fair price from their ISP, for example, had both Charter's website and their sales representative inform me that Charter was not available in their neighborhood and address, despite them having used Charter's service for ~7 years.)
After that, it's introductory deals with the actual pricing buried in fine print on another page. Constant push to try to bundle land-line and media services, representatives insisting you need to rent a modem/router combo from the company when their own website has information on providing your own modem/router. While I do realize not all modems are created equal, that was not the pitch given to people I know or to family while I was present and helping them set up Internet.
I don't know, it just seems like virtually everywhere else, even if the speeds in major US cities are comparable, the entire "experience" of shopping around and getting Internet access is just better. The only place in the US where I've lived and it wasn't a pain to get service was when I lived in Tacoma, WA and used one of their municipal services. Aside from some occasionally goofy DNS issues, the service was lovely, competitively priced with Comcast, and their reps were also really fantastic. They also were very good at quickly getting information customers on known outages; their automated support line would switch to a special greeting informing the caller of a known outage, which saved a heck of a lot of time when storm damage or another random event disrupted service.
