Moving from Sweden to the US (Florida) I can't say I've noticed much of a difference in connectivity. 100, 200, 300 & 1000MBps is readily available in both places but usually around at 3x the price in the US.

Rural America seems to be an entirely different story.

15M down / 768k up checking in from rural america. I have to stop my camera on video conferences if i want to talk.

My parents have been trying to get high speed internet for years. They're in a semi-rural, but suburbanizing area. They are surrounded by houses that have cable, but their house is older so it doesn't have it.

They had microwave for a while, but it didn't work in bad weather, and then the trees got too tall. They've finally resorted to paying the cable company thousands of dollars to bring cable to their house. It's such a ridiculous opaque process though that my mom basically has to stalk cable vans in her area and give the tech an earful to get status updates. The good techs know how shitty the process is, and one even gave her his personal phone number. However, it's not his department, so his ability to make things happen is limited.

She made the payment back in November, they got permits in January, and she hasn't heard from them since. I asked about how to get this done on DSLReports a while back, and the answer was to just keep calling them over and over and over, because every now and then you'd find someone with a clue.

I'm probably going to end up dropping $8-10k into a tower and point to point microwave links to two different cities. The ISP i'm on now wants $30K to put fiber in my house, but their network is so bad at the edge that i'd still need to get a loop to something else to get reasonable performance.

I'd still do the tower and resell b/w to recoup some of the costs.

Ouch :(

Just checked, and at the address I left in Sweden I could have gotten a 1.2GBps for ~$60/mo, almost what I pay for 100MBps here...

And my part of Rural America was supposed to have a local government broadband taskforce meeting next Tuesday. The county commissioner concerned won't reply saying whether the meeting is canceled or not though the emergency declaration said county offices are closed to the public. I sent the commissioner a message imploring him to find a way to keep the matter going as there will be an end to this crisis and our decaying, limited, legacy infrastructure that the local broadband incumbent is not investing in is holding us back.

I'm not holding my breath.

Silicon Valley here. My options are 20/1 DSL or cell. I chose cell.

There should be a mandate that all new buildings should have Fibre Optic cables laid out just like electronics wires and Water pipes.

Or even just a separate pipe for either Ethernet or Fibre Cables.

I have never heard any body complain about broadband speed from Japan, South Korea or Hong Kong. For parts of Europe, Such as Finland, Norway or Sweden are also mostly problem free.

I then decide look up their average Internet speed [1], and turns out they are all in the Top 10.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...

I live in Hong Kong and I always complain about my broadband speed. I get 1GBPs but actually it's not true, the link to US is limited and is rather small given how many people use it so connections speed outside of HK is around 80mbps much much slower than I had in Europe or Japan.

And the contract is for 24 months minimum, so if you leave the country before the end, you end up having to pay for the rest of your contract.

But, in general, US ISPs are particularly bad in my experience (and worse even than HK)

Europeans seem pretty proud of their Internet, at least relative to the US, for example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22631036

As a European, I'm quite happy with my Internet connections.

it's mostly the cost/quality ratio, it's not asia levels of modernity (they seemed to be the first on most things) but it's accessible and stable

on the other hand the web is filled with horror stories emanating from C....st customers.