Then tell me, are my assumptions correct? :)

That's understandable in the boonies, where hardly anyone live.
I live in Atlanta. 9th largest city in America. And guess what? The 50 megs internet we get in comcast areas (sadly I'm in a charter area), is faster the Los Angeles internet speeds.
There's no excuse for big cities not to get fast internet. Esp. when my low density city has the fastest speeds currently in the nation.

I didn't know it was like this in the cities too and I have absolutely no theory that would explain it: WeClock, we need your insight.

heh, no further comment.

If the government ever added regulations and forced cable and phone comapnies to compete, we'd have japan speds and prices in a year or two.
But they'll be on that right after they regulate banks and wall street and duke nukem forever comes out...

Competition isn't perfect in Germany either, basically because the infrastructure is too good and building alternative networks that can compete is very, very expensive, but we have some level of competition because the dominant providers are required to sell services to competitors at fixed rates. While that means that nobody can effectively offer rates below these rates, at least there's competition as far as pricing models are concerned. Additionally others with existing non-internet networks (like the cable TV or electricity net providers) are starting to use their infrastructure for internet access.

Just to say - i have Virgin cable and have not had a moments problem with it - 20meg line and no cap. Always on, always at full speed. Not defending it at large, cos its a bit expensive unless you get everything through them (TV, phone, internet, mobile), I do, so it works out pretty cheap for me...

Well naturally there are always going to be people who have a decent time with them. I expect it's the majority of customers too, but not an overwhelming majority. The general consensus on Virgin though is that their support is pants. Plus, they have speed caps at peak times which I think is total crap.
If you're on the service, not paying over the odds and happy with what you're getting - more power to you, but they are known for being a bit crap. Although thinking about it, the same could be said for the vast majority of providers in the UK.

I'm on ADSL2+ from an ISP called netspace. Fairly pricy at au$80 a month and then another au$40 for line rental on the compulsory bundled phone line I never use (they're talking about naked adsl but thats more complicated than its worth to get in my situation)
I've also got monthly data caps, 40GB during the "day" (10am-3am) and 120gb for "night" (3am-10am)
As for TV, well like I said I have ADSL2+ and the only TV I watch comes out of england and I could wait 4-6 months till it MIGHT screen here or wait 4-6 hours whilst I download 350MB of data...

I live in Hong Kong, one of the best cities in the world to get broadband cheap, so here's what I've got:
http://www.netvigator.com/]
Netvigator[/url] 8MBPS $398 per month (around US$49 a month). But we're looking at fibre-optic broadband, 100MBPS for around $500 a month. We don't have bandwidth caps, and we don't have our bandwidth throttled whenever we download stuff from BitTorrent (which is all the time).
Netvigator throws in an IPTV service deal, giving me two for-pay channels (I chose Discovery Channel and TV5MONDE) as well as a bunch of free channels (I also found a glitch that lets me watch HBO for free... shhh).
For phone, long distance calls here to most places are around HK 25 cents a minute, and around 15 cents a minute for local calls. I'm not sure about the provider, I'm not the person who pays for it. As for my mobile provider, I use a 3 HK phone, which is like 3 in the UK/AU, only even better.

I dunno man - that's almost three times what I'm paying for my 20meg uncapped line. Sounds like you wanna get on that 100meg line - a much better deal :).
As far as I'm aware, Scandinavians have the best net connections. I'm always hearing about swedes and their fat pipes. (Still talking about internet here :P).

Internet: Atlantic Nexus DSL (a regional provider in the next city over) $39.99 US.
TV: None. Well, we have a TV set and a DVD player, but no broadcast or cable reception.
Phone: Landline, local telco.

Well, we do get TV thrown in, as well as a wireless broadband plan in there. It's like quadruple play.

Like those 3G wireless stuff. They never let you pick the services one by one.