However the service you're describing is not ADSL, in which the DSL endpoint is in the exchange where all of an area's copper cables met but instead VDSL where the nearby local cabinet processes the DSL signals and is itself provided with fibre.

With VDSL the copper cable is maybe moving your Internet 100 metres, with ADSL it might be several kilometres, and so ADSL can't do 30 down 8 up, the most it's going to try is something like 12 down 2 up.

I’ve got some adsl speed at work in some location which are limited to under 8/1, which is fine as they are replacing isdn (which is also being turned off), service is sites. I assume it’s a similar technology to adsl.

From what I can tell, dsl of any type didn’t really take off in America.

VDSL was the core of the AT&T U-verse offerings in the US for a good decade perhaps a little more. This was marketed as a full cable replacement, as it included Internet, TV (including the normal cable channels), and optionally landline phone (over ip, but without some of the normal headaches of VOIP, as AT&T could treat this more like a digitized POTS line on their side, much like the normal pots lines they digitized behind the scenes). There were also some other smaller deployments here and there, but that seemed to be the biggest one in the US.

ADSL/ADSL2/ADSL2+ certainly did exist, but to work well you need to be relatively close to the local exchange, needed copper wires in good condition, etc. It was offered fairly widely, like by most companies offering phone service over copper lines, but because the quality could vary quite significantly depending on things not obvious to the purchaser, it tended to get a bad-rap. If you tried it once, but was unluck enough to have it not work well, you would write off the tech, and tell all your firends not to bother, and go go with the cable offering.

For me personally, in its heyday, ADSL2 beat cable hands down, as in that time frame cable was only using a tiny fraction of its bandwidth to provide internet service, and only a few feeds coming out of the local office, so the amount of oversubscription was insane, and amounted to basically fraud, as you could only ever get anywhere near your advertised speed at like 4 am.