The best way to handle all these issues is to use the median rather than the mean. If most people have no Ferraris, then the median person has no Ferrari. If most people can't afford gigabit, then the median person has no gigabit internet.
And yes, the US has much lower median speed (Speedtest.net reports an "average" of 191 Mbps in 11th place, and FairInternetReport reports a "median" of 30 Mbps in 23rd place)
Interesting about the pandemic. So that suggests the access problem was less bad than I had thought, since presumably lots of people were able to buy better Internet service, once it was important to them.
30Mbps seems fine to me. I only have slightly more than that here, and I have never felt the need to buy more even though I could afford it. Of course that's for one person, the median US household size is considerably more.
I've only given the following a cursory glance, but it doesn't look like consumers had much to do with the speed increase. Instead, Comcast was concerned with being called out on price gouging in Baltimore [0]. Or they increased their minimum speed without increasing the price [1,2] - which I'd think implies Baltimore had a point about the price gouging.
So while some people may have been able to buy better internet before, the data doesn't support that it was affordable, if it was even available at all.
And yes, the US has much lower median speed (Speedtest.net reports an "average" of 191 Mbps in 11th place, and FairInternetReport reports a "median" of 30 Mbps in 23rd place)
https://fairinternetreport.com/research/internet-speed-by-co...
The US's median speed doubled during the pandemic, though – it was apparently much lower before that.