[org.whodat]

Most of the smaller advanced countries do have better service and better phone systems. That is a fact, the reason. The size of the United States.

[RayChuang88]

People forget in South Korea and Japan, because of the very high urban population density, the local telcos can afford to spend the exorbitant cost to wire everyone for ultra-fast broadband, since there are enough potential users per square area of urban land to justify the installation costs involved. Here in the USA, only a relatively small number of cities have the type of potential user density to make such ultra-fast broadband connections economically viable.

Because of the lower urban density and the fact a large fraction of the US population lives in rural areas, the result is that the US telcos like AT&T, Verizon, etc. have to deliberately limit their speeds to make longer-distance connections possible. Right now, I'm running EarthLink ADSL at 6 megabits/second download/1 megabits per second upload, mostly limited by the DSL capacity on the AT&T lines.