Wireless should be good enough for mobile platforms, but even with the upcoming auction, there isn't enough spectrum available to compete against countries that are going with fibre.
Prior to getting wireless, I had 128-kbps ISDN. It cost thousands of dollars per year. The average consumer cannot afford that kind of money for such pitiful data rates.
I suspect that most of the folks who say our infrastructure is good enough already have reasonably good service. They suggest that anyone who wants a decent connection should move to the big city, or should commute 100-miles-per-day to a town with good connectivity for their jobs. I disagree with them.
For ISDN the phone company was about $40 to $75 a month depending on usage. The ISP was $35 a month for unlimited ISDN (not including the phone company charges). I didn’t spend thousands a year on ISDN even when that's all I had.
If you live out in the middle of nowhere, do you expect that the phone company or government should dig a trench to your house and lay fiber? Because that is the issue, not technology per se. It is all about the costs of getting to low density populations.
I believe if you go to the other countries you are so sure are ahead of us it is no better, and likely much worse for the people who live far from the cities. The difference is most Europeans live in the city unlike us. We like our space as obviously you do. We have far more roads and cars than Europe for the same reasons.
Cell phones were such a success in Europe before they were here because their wired phone systems sucked bad. Most are directly run by the government and are notoriously unreliable. I'd be surprised if that's changed much in the last 15 years.