A Boring Dystopia

Honestly, as an Aussie who has the NBN, it actually works surprisingly well, despite its rocky start and I can guarantee it's better than the previous setup we had, which was either Telstra/Optus cable for way too much money or you'd be stuck with cheap slow ~800kbps ADSL - and that's if you could even get wired internet. N In fact, despite the massive fuckup that was the initial rollout (things tend get fucked up when the government repeatedly changes hands mid-planning and implementation stages) it's actually doing quite well.

NBN sells its service through the ISPs at a set cost, the ISPs then compete for profit and add-ons - the speed plans are (up/down) Basic, (12/0.8). Basic II, (25/4), Standard(50/17), Fast(100/17), Superfast(250/22), ultrafast(700/40), so you're still buying it through an ISP, but you can expect a consistent pricing (though I swear the larger ISPs are always overpriced)

Speed plans are also dictated by what kind of connection the NBN offers in your neighbourhood - my neighbourhood recently upgraded, and supports all of them, but before I was limited to Fast speeds - super and ultra weren't available, as a matter of fact, we're still on Fast, even though there are higher options now, dad sees no reason to pay more.

It's a bit different for America - lots more people, and plenty of areas where gigabit is available, unlike Australia which had one of the worst internet speeds on earth. Already having good speeds makes it harder for a government to justify spending the money on something like the NBN

But the one thing the NBN and the buyout of all the original landlines and cable networks, as well as the construction of the NBN fiber networks did, is open up the market for hundreds of smaller ISPs, we now have so much choice for ISPs that the two selling points people look for when choosing are price and customer service, not speed as that's practically guaranteed. People flip between them for better deals all the time.

However some places only have access to fixed wireless and they often get their own, honestly pretty inconsistent and abysmal download speeds 2-11, 2-23, 2-75 - note that upload speeds aren't often advertised and the base speed is pretty shit - but before NBN they were stuck with mobile data or nothing, so it's still potentially an upgrade - provided you're not in an area where 2mbps is common.