You need to look at the Korea article I linked to in my other post.

The U.S. is doing a damn good job considering the limitations of size, multiple regulatory state environments, and having to think up the damn tech in the first place. Our size makes infrastructure--communications or otherwise--more difficult, but obviously not impossible. The sheer number of Americans with good connections shown in that graph speaks for itself.

We aren't really "behind the curve" as a whole, and I don't think we're having economic problems because we don't have enough internet available. If we're losing tech support jobs to India, I suspect it has a lot more to do with how much an Indian gets paid than how fast their connections are.

The cell phone industry went from almost nothing to a large chunk of our overall communications with little fuss, no mandates whatsoever, and damn little government support.

Our town is wired with fiber, but as yet there hasn't really been the demand to pull it into the homes. Somebody has to pay for that, and the profit margin on internet service is very competitive. What has happened is that the connections people already have in place, such as cable and DSL (phone), have been vastly improved without laying a single new cable or line. I'm getting ten times the DSL speed over my phone line than I was a year ago, and at half the price. My cable service tells me about increases in speed and performance pretty much every month.

I'm not sure where people get the idea that having a bunch of technologically butt-ignorant lawyers in Washington running things would be an improvement. The tendency I've seen in such cases is for the Congress to latch onto whatever tech "fad of the day" they saw last, and force it into the system whether the system wants it or not. You should have learned something from the Great Ethanol Mandate.

I wouldn't have problems with government supporting, say, more connections into government run schools. At least that would be appropriate. But the way to do it is to provide the money and let the districts choose the solutions.