Why United States is 16th in Broadband Deployment

As a companion to the last post about Tim Berners-Lee on net neutrality is an analysis of the telecom companies bait-and-switch grab where they were paid $200 billion to build out broadband fiber-optic infrastructure and instead they simply pocketed it and kept on going. It's juicy, it's sordid and it's true.

By 2006, according to telecommunication companies' own documents, 86 million customers in the United States should have received 45 Mbps service. In fact, South Korea and Japan do even better: they routinely offer 100 Mbps connections in both directions, uploading and downloading, for around $40 per month. But in the United States, the best connections top out at 1/3 this speed and cost 400% more—and very few places even have access to the new fiber-optic services being offered. The United States once led the world in Web technology. What happened?