For your information, 30Mbps is, in fact, ultra fast. I have “only” 1.5Mbps, and I can watch Hulu and Netflix just fine.
Most people don’t understand that internet companies just aren’t going to lay fiber-optic over hundreds of miles of near-empty land out of the goodness of their hearts. They have to expect to make a profit from it, or they won’t do it. As a matter of fact, it’s been just within the last decade that the last few places in America got plain old PHONE service!
And yet Norway, with a population density not that much higher than Nebraska, and great honking hunks of granite in between those little clumps of houses that barely qualify as “villages”, has better broadband and cellular coverage than the average of the whole United States.
Distance alone isn’t the only problem. National priorities also play a role.
SpeedTest indicates that my 8 Mb/s ADSL service peaks around 6 Mb/s, and it sucks compared to my Comcast service at my USA house. I can’t steam Netflix without constant buffering, and the Slingbox stutters all the time (gosh, how I wish it would just buffer). Then if I want to receive torrents, it takes days. If I want to do all of this through a VPN, my speed is cut in half again. I very happily pay $70 a month for Comcast in Michigan. My crappy connection here in China isn’t at all worth the $25 USD equivalent that I pay. Rumor is we’re getting fiber in the neighborhood, though.
My internet comes to 47.75 Mbps (according to SpeedTest), and I’m on the edge of nowhere (Santa Barbara, CA). So, it appears there is a lot of variation in these numbers.
Are there antennas on the mountain? On Menorca cellular antennas are situated on the island’s only mountain and reception is mighty good from that location.
According to that South Korea has the fastest internet but it also has a population of about 50 million in an area about a quarter the size of California. It’s also worth mentioning Seoul has a population of 10,000,000. So it has 1/5 of the country’s population in an area about half the size of Los Angeles. So basically it would be like half of New York City or Los Angeles (only the city) having 20% of the U.S. population.
As stated earlier the size of the U.S. makes it difficult for an accurate comparison. It’s much easier to have fast internet in a dense country.
If you are willing to pay for it though, you can have just as fast internet in the U.S. as in any other country. And most people living in the city or suburbs do.