Lead? Telecom in the US is an oligopoly, with most of the major spending backed by government grants. Many areas are still supported by rotting copper and old 2g/3g towers because there's no incentive for providers to upgrade them. Unless you meant something else by "communications industry".

That rotting copper is going to be immensely valuable after the collapse.

Yeah, go check out what type of ISP service you can get in Australia for comparison of a similarly sized country. Get ready for ADSL and quotas.

It has nothing to do with size and everything to do with politics. Plenty of small countries have crap internet too.

Australia's internet sucks because the conservative government nerfed the NBN plan.

There is no large country that has amazing Internet everywhere. Size does matter in this regard.

"everywhere" is moving the goalposts. The US (and Australia) doesn't even have amazing internet in the cities.

It does, both of the last two metros I lived in offered gig symmetrical fiber to my apartment for $70/mo.

What's keeping our "lead in communications industry" at risk (and has been for decades) is the broken pricing model for mobile data. With that model, whether you have 4G, 5G or 9G wouldn't change anything because the limiting factor is never the speed but the usage quotas.