No, US is the anomaly, since other countries in Europe have better/cheaper offers both for mobile and fixed connections (dsl,cable,fiber). I agree with the poster above, the US mobile and broadband offers are a joke and for that reason I also use a cheap prepaid and make most of my calls through voip.
Initially coming from Europe, I started with a ISDN line at 128kbit/s about 14 years ago and 9k6 mobile connection through a cheap gsm phone with internal modem (it accepted AT commands and I built a simple adapter to connect to my laptop).
Later on I migrated to cable at roughly twice the speed and for the past ten years had increase in speed and same or price reductions due to competition (3g, dsl, fiber).
Now for the same monthly payments I have here in the US, over there I have 3 times the bandwidth over cable, and this service also allows me to purchase a cheap USB dongle to use the same subscriber account for 3G mobile data access.
Not only that, the increase in speed has been mostly non-existent for the years I've been in the US, although living in a large and densely populated city...
Initially coming from Europe, I started with a ISDN line at 128kbit/s about 14 years ago and 9k6 mobile connection through a cheap gsm phone with internal modem (it accepted AT commands and I built a simple adapter to connect to my laptop).
Later on I migrated to cable at roughly twice the speed and for the past ten years had increase in speed and same or price reductions due to competition (3g, dsl, fiber).
Now for the same monthly payments I have here in the US, over there I have 3 times the bandwidth over cable, and this service also allows me to purchase a cheap USB dongle to use the same subscriber account for 3G mobile data access.
Not only that, the increase in speed has been mostly non-existent for the years I've been in the US, although living in a large and densely populated city...