It's no longer true that the US lags behind on Internet access speeds.
The US is ranked #10 in the world in average Internet access speeds, just barely behind Denmark and Japan. The countries that rank in front of the US are mostly tiny population wise. We're far faster than eg France, or Australia. Competitively, US access speeds have improved substantially in the last ten years.
Here's who ranks in front of the US: South Korea, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Hong Kong, Finland, Switzerland, Singapore, Japan.
Here is who the US ranks in front of: Canada, Australia, France, Germany, Russia, Brazil, China, Mexico, Taiwan, New Zealand, India, Indonesia, Netherlands, Romania, Britain, Czech, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Poland, Italy, Greece, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia - and all of Africa + all of Latin America.
The US has 2x the average access speeds of Italy, and neary 2x the speeds of France.
Within 24 to 36 months, the US will likely pass Japan on average access speeds.
This is a massive improvement over where the US was ten years ago and it's getting better faster than most countries.
The US ranks #8 on percentage of connections above 15mbps (48%), just behind Sweden and in front of Denmark. The US ranks #10 on percentage above 25mbps, with dramatically faster growth in that segment than anyone else in the top 10. Between Q1 2016 and Q1 2017, the US saw a 65% leap in % of connections over 25mbps; Finland, ranked #9, by comparison saw a 31% improvement.
So not only is the US killing it on access speeds now, particularly for a massive country of 330 million people, it's improving far faster than most other comparable nations.
Here's the Q12017 pdf:
https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...