I'm personally I strong believer in the free market, however sometimes the market is too short-sighted to make investments that will benefit society in the long run. Infrastructure and education are good examples of that. It's hard for private investors to get good ROI on things like roads, IT-networks and schools because it takes many years to get any return and it's hard to charge people as much as it actually benefits the public.
I saw and interview with Bill Gates where he basically said that this was his rationale behind the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The market simply doesn't maximize the amount of lives saved per dollar and you need non-profit organizations to do that.
Although, now there's one cable ISP that offers 110/5Mbit/s for around 70 Canadian dollars per month.
That's basically the only operator interested in advancing things.
In the US, that would never fly. The people that are willing to pay for the features need them to work in all the "large metro areas", which doesn't mean "Manhattan" but rather "suburbs of Phoenix" and so on. This makes infrastructure roll-outs very expensive, and it's why they never happen.
(Incidentally, people in the US and Japan have similar commute times, but the population density in the US goes down a lot faster as you move away from the city center. In Tokyo, it's densely packed until you get to the mountains.)
Population density has its advantages; look at everything Japan has that the US doesn't (100Mbps internet for $20/month, interesting cell-phone features, amazing rail systems), and population density explains it all. But then, they don't have 5 bedroom houses for $150,000, either.