I dream of a world where symmetric 100 is $30/mo everywhere though!
I have available to me gigabit (down) from Comcast. I had it for awhile and it was glorious but it was also $80/mo on promo and $110 when not. The reason I got it was not for the download speeds, it was the faster upload speeds that came along with it. Still slow, and not even remotely close to speedy. But it was a solid 12mbit up. Compared to the 5mbit up I get on my 100down plan.
I would kill for some reliable upload speeds. It's awful anymore just sending images to people, never mind you want to send a quick minute long video to someone and it takes several minutes to send.
I'm renting office space in town where the best I can get is a 40 Mb DSL line because I can't get anything other than HughesNet at the house. More than a few days of SSH over satellite will make you want to regret the day you decided programming would be a fun profession.
Forgetting about the latency for a moment, even though HughesNet advertises nice speeds, it's very much the same "speeds up to" crap most other ISP do. They're so oversubscribed that you can barely browse the internet in the evening most of the time.
In SF though I'm in a webpass wired building and have 1gbps up and down for ~$700/yr or ~$58/month.
On the Peninsula Comcast had 1gbps down and 35mbps up, but they also had a (very expensive) Comcast Gigabit Pro plan that was 2gbps down and 2gbps up with a second 1gbps down/up line included too and a fancy switch also. Hard to order though and the reps don't know about it. Cool that it's available though.
I never ended up getting it, but I wrote up some details here: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeNetworking/comments/fs6un2/comc...
The only downside is that some websites are blocked, or slowed down at some points.
Anecdotally, I moved into a newish (~5 year old) apartment building in Seattle and had my choice of three ISPs that each provided symmetrical gigabit for around $60/month, delivered via an Ethernet jack in a low-voltage cabinet in my closet.
Getting it wired up took one phone call, wherein my switch port was activated remotely and I could grab an IP address and start using the internet. IPv6 via DHCPv6-PD and everything else worked without a charm.
On the other hand, where I live in (also Seattle) is served by exactly one ISP via DOCSIS, providing 1000/35 but nothing more. It can vary block by block here unfortunately.
If we wanted what other countries have for internet, then what we need is to make the lines public and have ISPs rent them from the government. The reason ISPs can create these duopolies is because every new company has to invest a LOT of money to lay down new data lines. If a company already has their cable/phone lines in place then boom, captured market.
Rentable public data lines would make the cost of setting up new ISPs a LOT cheaper.
All of my neighboring blocks have 1g/1g from them, but the most they offer at my address is a 40/40 "fiber-based coax" internet that I'm probably not even wired for. I would love for that to change - my DOCSIS internet has been pretty solid, but I miss the gigabit upload.
Wave G (NOT Wave's coax-based DOCSIS that they bought years ago) offers/offered IPv6 via PD, lots of documentation for it around the internet: https://gist.github.com/dmtucker/cf3f241cf002367825633c988ff... (this isn't me).
I haven't been a Wave G customer in a number of years, but I don't anticipate it's changed since ~2018
Right now I'm at my parents in a small 1000-inhabitants village (closest "large" city, Carcassonne, 45k inhabitants, is 30km away) and they're getting 2gb fiber installed next week.
As with most things like this in the US, the cause is privatization of things that should be public utilities and unchecked monopolistic behavior. In most places you have exactly one choice in internet service provider, so they give you what they give you at the price they ask and you deal with it or you don't have home internet.
And in 2011? Forget about it. I had crappy copper-wire DSL in 2011 and was glad for it.
But I wonder how it looked e.g. in Romania at that time, they had pretty nice fiber infrastructure because they didn't a lot of the old cables, and in 2015 I read that they had 500 Mbps links (not sure if symmetric) affordable.
And in Poland I'm currently paying ~20 USD/month for 1Gbps up / 300 Mbps down (I got it 2 years ago). 4 years ago I had 300 Mbps / 30 Mbps for similar amount.
This is in suburbs of a bigger city (not capital).
My building was advertised this way, and my apartment has 30Mb ADSL, because that's how the complex was wired when it was built.