It's amazing to me that all these connections are still physicial (as opposed to some software-defined switching between providers). Something akin to software-defined networking.
What you want is "local loop unbundling". It's how this works in Europe where you have artificial non-free markets with real price competition, rather than natural monopolies without price competition as in the US.
The state PUCs didn't do much enforcement either, but the FCC deciding not to enforce the law killed it.
[1] not exactly well -- when the ILEC regularly offers individual customers service at rates under the wholesale rates; and the regulators don't do anything; that's not really working well.
What Europe does isn't really a good benchmark for how to structure a telecom market, because all the big European countries have slower broadband than in the US: https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-t... (the U.S. beats the U.K., Germany, Spain, France, Italy--which accounts for 2/3 of the population of the EU).
As far as that perception goes, my suspicion is that it has to do with the tech press/readership skewing young and urban. The U.S. is highly unusual in making the actual building of wires largely a state/local issue, and also in treating cities as ghettos instead of national priorities. Maryland, where I live, is a microcosm: if it were a country, it'd be just below Finland for broadband speeds. But it's only major city (Baltimore) is impoverished, and doesn't have fiber even though all the counties around it do. My neck of the state is pretty rural--large parts of it don't even have public water/sewer. But it's had fiber for a decade. Meanwhile, New York and Boston are just now getting fiber, and San Francisco still mostly doesn't have it.
This sounds completely backwards, until you realise all persistent problems in the US can be traced to racism.
(I'm still unconvinced as to the idea that broadband is statistically "better" in the US but the customers complain far more. I suspect that a huge chunk of people prefer slow/cheap/reliable to fast/expensive, certainly once you get beyond about 10mbit.)
Cable for TV was never a huge thing in the UK like it is in the states - satellite TV (Sky) was the bigger thing.
A lot of people will opt for the cheaper standard DSL though (<16Mbit), which I suspect is what brings down the average. In the US you have little choice but to pay obscene prices for a very fast cable line, usually with a monthly cap.
I'm not doubting they actually give you a gigabit connection, but especially during peak hours, I doubt the transit links you hit would necessarily have that much to spare.
For doing backups/restores, in this age of multi-terabyte disks, fast network links (especially in the upload direction) are a necessity.
I don't mind some oversubscription, I can work around peak hours, hell, I'd love to temporarily trade away most of my downlink bandwidth in exchange for uplink bandwidth -- average upload speed is all that matters for this sort of large transfer.
Compounding that, the latency comcast deliberately introduces into their network (I've got many ISP's to judge on here) makes the internet ugly, but only if you don't pay for their services.
What we need is not a target for faster downstream, but higher competition - I could give a shit about network neutrality if the providers offered network honesty: a 500 GB monthly limit is a 1.5mB stream - full stop.
FTTB, either through G.FAST OR Ethernet is a better use of all that money in my opinion and it's a lot easier to upgrade in the future (either the building terminal or switcing to full fiber i.e. AON/GPON etc).
Using increasingly involved techniques to get more speed out of a century-old technology is pretty much a dead end.
100Mbit is decent, but it comes at the price of * the wires needing to be very short by telco standards * the use of DSL vectoring, which creates mini-monopolies in the DSLAM and allows one provider (usually Telekom) to hold all users on that DSLAM hostage
And keep in mind that if we had fiber, we could probably get a Gbit.
Make no mistake, the strong position of DSL in Germany is the result of politics, not common sense.
United Kingdom 16.3mbps average 91% above 4mbps United States 17.2mpbs average 88% above 4mbps
which implies that the US has a slightly different, more unequal curve where slightly fewer people have "adequate" broadband and a small number have much faster broadband.
So I think it's fair to say that the U.S. curve is more unequal. There's more people without access to adequate broadband (in New Mexico, or inner-city Baltimore) than in Europe. But the median American likely has a faster broadband connection than the median European.
During the Comcast install, I watched the guy physically break a part of the telephone network interface box. I just sorta assumed he was incompetent and fat fingered it, but the Centurylink guy who fixed it put some sort of weird plastic mold in place of the part that the Comcast guy broke. Ever since that happened, I've sorta half wondered whether that happens more often than not.
What you're describing is called "local loop unbundling". Lots of other countries do it, it works great, and it would solve most if not all of the problems with the telco market in the US... so naturally these companies lobby hard to make sure it'll never happen.