You are fortunate to live in a town where those services are available, and I know you're doing good work with your broadband connection. Comcast is doing a good job in their service areas, and Verizon is doing a much better job that AT&T.
Unfortunately, the broadband infrastructure in many other states is primitive compared to your location. Most of the broadband availability is concentrated in urban areas, which also happen to be liberal strongholds. Many of the more conservative areas of the country do not have the same affordable access that you enjoy. The Democrats now have a big advantage in broadband, and they will use it to their advantage.
Efforts are underway to get an accurate assessment of where broadband service is and is not available in the U.S., but the telcos are doing everything in their power to prevent that information from being known.
There is no doubt that the U.S. is falling behind other industrialized countries in broadband deployment, and it is hurting our economy. It should be a top priority for our country to deploy basic broadband service as widely as possible. That doesn't mean that every place should have 10 Mbps connections, but we should aim for at least 256 Kbps of ubiquitous access.
I strongly disagree with your scenario that we are falling behind in the broadband internet service. According to Nielsen/Net rating report in June 21 2006 it says that 72% of US homes has broadband internet www.nielsen-netratings.com/pr/pr_060621.pdf . The link below made in 2005 shows 61% of homes in the US use the internet service and that was in 2005, http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0509/ . So with the same growth from 2005 to 2006 we can say that in August 2007 over 80% of American homes have broadband internet. Also 85% of businesses used broadband internet services and in 2005, I am sure today it is over 90% if not over 95% of businesses who have broadband internet
You may see the same percentage of broadband users in Europe and Japan as in the US but less people there have access in their homes to the internet compared to people in the US for the simple reason that more Americans own computers at home than Europeans or other people in the world.
My previous post shows the % of people accessing the internet and the US is by far number one. There is a reason internet cafes are much more popular in Europe and the world than the US, and that is because much less people in these places have computers at home to access the intenet compared to the US. This by itself make the big difference and the other statistics are secondary.