This is so ridiculous, it's literally unbelievable. My home city, Kiev(Ukraine), has multiple 1 Gbit residential broadband providers for $6 - $15. Not joking.
However, here in the US, I've got a 50mbps connection, and I regularly get 50mbps.
Reference: those name-and-shame articles a while back from a network company (Level 3, from memory?) that produced hard numbers on how little $ US cable/DSL internet companies were willing to put into improving their capacity at the peer link.
[Edit] Yup, Level 3. I thought they were interesting because hard numbers at this level seem difficult to come by. Here are the articles from 2014:
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/chicken-game-played-chi...
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-internet-m...
for example, symmetrical 10mbps metro ethernet is close to $2k/month here in LA. yes, for real.
commercial service has higher SLA's (which really doesn't mean a damn thing, it's just tradition) and is more expensive.
it's highly dependent on your office building's location. cable companies and fiber operators do not canvas entire commercial districts like they do residential areas.
I bet in Kiev, a fiber provider wanting to lay fiber wouldn't be turned down for not agreeing to wife up the poor neighborhoods that couldn't afford it any way. That's what happens here.
Also most high speed connections in Kiev are not fiber but ethernet cables.
My least favorite aspect of these stories has to be all the people who like to list out the price of internet connectivity as if it lives in a vacuum. It's not really a meaningful datapoint on its own for a number of reasons, and the conversation it engenders is almost never worth reading.
Why? How does the truth of a story have any bearing on its believability.
(Eg some people are literally unable to believe some scientific facts.)