Re: AT&T broadband
Here in the UK I always used to be jealous of the US dial-up and later BB market. It always seemed so much better, cheaper and faster. Especially th free local calls and local PoPs.
Recently I just got a free upgrade from my cableco from 60Mb/s to 100Mb/s. Just because they want to prove they are the fastest. (they do offer faster speeds too)
I guess it partly depends on where you live but the UK is generally densely populated so there are usually multiple ISPs serving most areas (rural is another matter, even some town outskirts). I gather the US market is much more of a collection of local monopolies with one at most two or maybe three suppliers in many areas other than large cities.
What it looks like from the perspective of 2015 is a leapfrog effect. At some stage it becomes time to upgrade the network and naturally they use the latest tech to do that although I suspect that won't be quite so obvious in the future when it's all FTTC or FTTH.
So called 3rd world countries often have state of the art networks because they were installing from new, not trying to eak out more ROI from an existing network like BT did with ISDN thus delaying DSL by a few years here or cable BB because the UK cable network arrived much later than the US one and so remained analogue to get the ROI before following the US digital/DOCCIS conversion.