Watching The Screen Savers right now and a guest on the show, author George Gilder, just called the US a "3rd World Country" when it comes to technology, and more specifically when it comes to broadband. I founds a link to this artlic he wrote titled Making Broadband Bloom, here is snip:

South Korea has become the world-class broadband center that the United States should have been. It has a thriving tech stock market, a profitable telecom sector, and at least 20 times more per capita bandwidth than the United States. Americans pay about $40 a month for well less than 1 megabit per second. Koreans pay $25 a month for 6 to 8 megabits per second. In addition, for only slightly higher prices, Koreans already have 1 million very high-speed digital subscriber lines running at 13 to 20 megabits per second, and deployment of some 2 million new links of 50 megabits per second is planned for the next 12 months.