There is no competition; let's exclude the probably sub-10% of the US where you are in a major city, live in a MDU, and can get genuine fiber (at least 1G/1G, last mile metro-e/eth/fiber, for the purposes of this), or live in an area that has at least one fiber provider.

Your choices are: cable (either Comcast or Spectrum, pretty much everyone else has been acquired into one of these), ADSL1 (3 Mbps or less), LTE ($10-15/GB used, no carrier actually has an unlimited plan and they will terminate you for using a phone plan SIM in your hotspot, all heavily DPI and modify your traffic). In rare areas, AT&T or similar offer "home internet" (250GB cap $60/m on contract) over LTE.

Comcast, Spectrum, et al have long since advertised fiber (they do coax/cable). They brag about their fast fiber network in an attempt to mislead people in the US that don't know better. Last mile is cable, and upstream is generally sub-10Mbps + because the last mile is cable, your latency for things such as video games are significantly worse (15ms vs <1ms to something in the same city).

In fact, Comcast does not even list upload speeds on their site anymore the last time I checked. No matter how hard you drill down, click Details, read the fine print, etc. This is incredibly good for "shut up and consume media" and incredibly bad for "learn, upload, create". On top of that, they repeatedly use the word gigabit for plans offering sub-ADSL upload speeds. They do not mention upload. It appears that currently the highest tier plans on Comcast offer up to 35 Mbps upload based on HN comments and DSLReports forum posts.

Comcast and their cable friends also repeatedly attempt to use their billions to sue small towns into the ground when they try to start a community broadband project[0][1][2][..etc]. Trying to start muni fiber is a great way to drown in lawsuits from every incumbent provider that _does not even serve your area or have plans to serve your area_, they just want to set a precedent. Like they literally do not care for your city at all and do not plan to ever offer service there because it's a waste of money to them, but they will happily spend many millions trying to kill this.

Contracts are usually mandatory, signed for several years, along with other anticompetitive things like requiring the use of their remotely-administered equipment that you are locked out of, or charging you large fees to use your own. For example, ludicrously low bandwidth caps on Comcast, where they charge you the cost of an unmetered gigabit plan in most countries just to remove the cap. But you can get a discount if you use their remotely-controlled hardware that also requires you to sign in to your account to view your wifi password and runs a public hotspot off it.

[EDIT BASED ON COMMENT REPLIES: OK, contracts are no longer mandatory these days, but in reality you are going to pay at minimum 1.5x to 2x the cost per month without the contract discount, at least on Comcast. For the vast majority of the US, they will often take this, eat the hard credit inquiry hit to save on the money, though.]

There are a few incumbent-esque fiber providers like Frontier that offer bizarre speed choices and mandatory contracts (2 years is often the case), which cap out at something like 200 Mbps for "FTTH" which is odd, and has useful support roughly equivalent to Comcast on a good day. These providers also have spent money lobbying on the above instead of, I don't know, updating their networks.

Generally in any location in the US (with exceptions like in SF, Seattle, Oakland, etc. where you are lucky enough to live in a MDU with multiple fiber providers or a municipal broadband area), you do not actually have a free choice of provider, it's either cable or ADSL1. Almost no provider of DSL does VDSL or ADSL2+ or similar; if you are in an area that demands DSL it's likely you are sitting at 3-6Mbps down and sub-1Mbps up. Almost no provider will bond multiple DSL lines.

In most other countries, DSL is generally significantly more tolerable to use (and I love the fritzbox compared to the abomination of ISP-provided hardware I've seen in the US), which is probably one of the reasons why people think the US has choices when it comes to DSL. They have VDSL2 - the US has ADSL1 that caps at 3 Mbps on a good day and goes out when it rains; DSL is the "I have no other options" choice, not the first choice. For example, in Germany, 1&1's $25 DSL plan actually beats Comcast 'gigabit' on upload.

[0] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc... (potentially biased source; affiliate advertising for home internet)

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-comcas...

[2] https://muninetworks.org/content/mediacom-lawyers-slow-compe...