I still think the best public data is the FCC international broadband survey and report which I have previously referenced. The Ookla "promise" figures can be used to validate the advertised speeds in that dataset versus actual speeds.
The issue is not merely of availability of very high speed (>25mbps) connections but its price, an area in which the FCC study demonstrates the US is not competitive. [This information cannot be obtained from the data sets you mentioned].
Moreover, most people, certainly most people here, don't care about nation-wide or even state-wide averages, and they distort the figures, in favor of the US no less (rural Wyoming probably has better access than rural Romania, nobody cares about either). What are the figures for the main urban centers? As a datapoint, based on the FCC data I don't think there is a major US city which is competitive with Warsaw, Poland except possibly for Austin due to Google Fiber.
What would help settle this issue is if someone like Netflix , Google or Dropbox incorporated a speed test (they don't seem to test beyond their stream rates currently) and made the granular data public.
Finally, it is anecdotal but I have found those who have lived in Scandinavia (or Eastern Europe) and the US say pretty consistently that the broadband is much worse in the latter.
No comments yet.