The US is falling behind in terms of network bandwidth to the home. This is attributed to many factors. Personally, I'm most empathetic to the duopoloy argument. Where I live - in a small city in Sweden - we can get 300-500 Mbit/s download and 30-50 Mbit/s upload for under US$150 per month (says
https://www.comhem.se/bredband/bredbandspaket ).
On that scale, AT&T U-verse High Speed Internet, with a 'Max Turbo' download speed of 24 Mbit/s at $66/mo (says http://www.att.com/u-verse/explore/internet-landing.jsp?fbid... ), is rather slow.
For the same price we can get 30-50 Mbit/s download. Which is what I have, since 500 Mbit/s is a lot more than we need. This is the first time in my life I've ever not gotten the highest bandwidth option.
Unfortunately, it looks like the best choices for you are either to look for alternative and/or get involved with politics. At the very least, complain to your city and state representatives, since that has the most impact on your local service providers.
Can you quantify how much time is wasted, and how much that is worth to you? This would help strengthen your complaint, and perhaps help you understand which alternatives might be more worthwhile.
Wicked! I just learned about 3G/4G cellular bonding. "The LiveU solution bonds up to 14 cellular (3G/4G – LTE/WiMAX) modems over multiple carriers, as well as multiple LAN and even BGAN satellite connections. This creates a reliable, broadband video uplink pipe over multiple narrow-band pipes." So if you have the money, there are solutions for getting higher bandwidth.