It is not working well ... price and performance aren't close to being world class and many regions of the country see terrible price and performance.
The FCC asked scholars at the Berkman Center at Harvard for a look into the subject and got
this (pdf) (disclosure - I have several friends who have been associated with the Berkman Center and am impressed with the work that goes on there)
lots and lots of interesting data and those who are interested should plow in...
The bottom line is US ISPs won't be happy with the findings (and they shouldn't - they lost the lead some time ago) .. Ars has a good high level
summary.
comments from the Ars piece:
snip
One other list really brings the point home. When one looks at the actual download speeds in various cities around the world, no US city even makes the top 20. Instead, honors go to:
- Busan
- Seoul
- Göteborg
- Stockholm
- Yokohama
- Amsterdam
- Paris
- Tokyo
- Aarhus
- Helsinki
- Rotterdam
- Hamburg
- Kosice
- Bern
- Berlin
- Copenhagen
- Espoo
- Lyon
- Lisbon
- Oslo
So congratulations, residents of Busan and Aarhus. Of course, we all know that the only reason you're winning the broadband race is because we live among the amber waves of grain while you scuttle about in concrete high rises.
Actually, the Berkman report debunks the population density argument, too. "The surprise here is that despite its high density, South Korea actually outperforms even what its high urban density would predict, and that highly dense countries like the Netherlands and Denmark also outperform what their urban concentration would predict," it says. "In general, most of the countries that appear to be positive observation models, as identified by their levels of penetration, are above their predicted penetration levels given urban concentration, suggesting that their presence in the higher quintiles of penetration indeed marks them as potential models for policy observation, rather than simply as the beneficiaries of propitious geography."