One more data point: I pay about $55/mo (after all taxes and fees) for 15/5 Comcast here in Utah. That will go up somewhat after the first year. I'm limited to 250GB per month, after which I'm not sure what happens--I'm definitely not using 10GB per day every day, though I probably hit that on heavy usage days once a week or so. The Internets say that Netflix HD movie streaming is under 2GB per hour, so I'd have to be streaming in HD for 5 hours per day, every day of the month, before I got near my limit.

I have Sprint's WiMax coverage (through Clearwire) on my phone, which has a 5GB cap on 3G data but is unlimited for WiMax/4G. I get about 2Mbps down on 4G at my house, but I'm really far from a tower. At my office I get a consistent 6-8Mbps down through my phone. I pay $70/mo including taxes and fees for my phone bill, which includes 450 minutes and unlimited text.

I don't mean to be a party pooper, but $50 for 60GB seems stupidly cheap.

I have to pay $100 for a 40GB plan, and isn't New Zealand supposed to be a first world country? I have to agree, prices are out of control. I used to live in Singapore where it was unlimited, I thought the whole world was like that, but since moving here it has all changed. And the thing about my internet, I am paying for what was supposed to be a 20GB plan. However Telecom (my provider) gave us double when my family tried to move to another provider. Woopie! Oh, wait, we're still Shit. I hope that something gets done about this, the prices are just plain unfair.

I always thought NA had good internet compared to Australia, but it seems we've caught up while NA has stagnated.
I'm still envious of Sweden/Korea/Japan et al

My experience in rural Australia (2005):
* $30p/mo for 56kbps dial-up, unlimited.

My experience in metropolitan Sydney (2008):
* $60p/mo for 512kbps down, 64kbps up. After 4GB downloads, it's capped to 64kbps down. Also, if you repeatedly go over the cap, they sent you an angry letter threatening to cut you off.

My experience in metropolitan Melbourne (2011):
* $50p/mo for 18mbps down, 1mbps up. After 100GB 'peak' usage (up and down), it's capped to 1mbps down. Separate 100GB usage cap for 'off-peak' (2am to 8am).
* $60p/mo for 18mbps down, 1mbps up. Unlimited.
[edit]
*$50p/mo for a mobile phone plan that includes 1.5GB of downloads via 3G.

I always thought NA had good internet compared to Australia, but it seems we've caught up while NA has stagnated.

Our internet has always sucked. Unless you live IN a big city, service is still relatively slow. I pay $50 a month for 8 mbps. At my old town it was 3mbps. Alot of places just recently got broadband. And you still can't get fiber in most cities. I understand it for the most part, the US is pretty huge and it's not realistic to have mega speeds for everyone, but I wouldn't say we are competitive in terms of infrastructure.

Your info about the peaks is interesting. It leaves me with an idea. It would be neat if Netflix (now the largest consumer of bandwidth), had an option to temporarily download movies from a queue. So you could pick a few movies from your instant queue and specify a time to download (say offpeak 2-5am or something), and it would download all those movies to a temporary area until you were ready to watch. That way we could distribute the bandwidth to offpeak times. It would also allow you to download a higher quality movie than you would be able to stream.

Our internet has always sucked. Unless you live IN a big city, service is still relatively slow. I pay $50 a month for 8 mbps. At my old town it was 3mbps. Alot of places just recently got broadband. And you still can't get fiber in most cities. I understand it for the most part, the US is pretty huge and it's not realistic to have mega speeds for everyone, but I wouldn't say we are competitive in terms of infrastructure

It's pretty much the same situation here then. DSL or cable outside of cities is a fairly new development. Fast DSL (8-24mbps) is becoming more common, but is still restricted in it's penetration. A lot of people are on horrible 3G/WiMax/Satellite etc...

Our republican-equivalents sold off the telecommunications infrastructure decades ago, and are vehemently against any kind of investment into upgrading it (and the media generally backs this position very strogly).
Luckily though, our democrat-equivalents are in power at the moment, and have (controversially) signed off on a huge $28 billion project to build a fibre-optic to-the-premises network that supposedly will cover 93% of the population (woo ethernet sockets!). I'm sure you guys could afford it if you just be frugal and skip a war or two ;)

And to think I've been complaining about paying £17 a month for 24mbps unlimited. Now fair enough, due to the distance to the phone exchange, I don't quite get the speed I'm paying for - but judging by the comments here, guess I can't complain too much. Some of you guys overseas really do have it bad.

My old hughesnet plan was much worse. Try dealing with a 375mb limit per 24 hrs, download speeds averaging 90kpbs, and uploads that never broke like 6.0kbps - all for $90/month.