It's not just that foreign governments have done "better" things. It's that the US is a much harder place to provide broadband (or any service to). The population density of the US is 31 people per square KM. Compare that to the UK at 246 or South Korea at 498 or the Netherlands at 398 or even Ireland (the least dense European country) at 59 - and, of course, Ireland has crappy internet.

The cost to lay cable in the US is higher by several orders of magnitude. 10 miles of fiber cabling will cost 10x the cost of 1 mile of fiber cabling when both are bought in bulk. The US has inherent higher costs. The answer cannot be, "just do what other countries do".

Since someone will ask: why then can't New Jersey and Massachusetts which have high population densities have better cheap internet? Because companies price things nationally and not relative to the actual cost of providing the service to the customer. Customers revolt when you try to explain to them that they cost more to service and so you're going to charge them more money.

The US will have higher costs for anything that has costs per mile because we have more miles to cover. I'm actually shocked that the US is so competitive in areas like broadband and wireless coverage given that those business have to build a ton more infrastructure to cover the same number of people.