[xyzzyz]

My mother lives in a small European 5k residents town, she does not spend much time on the Internet and she watches mostly satelite television. Yet she was interested in choosing the best among 4 or 5 offers -- just because she had a choice. Her offer was much better than everything I've seen in the US, and it still was only medium price to speed ratio, because she does not live in a big city. She does not actually need the amount of bandwidth she bought, but it was cheap, so she got that nevertheless.

It's not the customers demands that drive the prices down, it's the fear that other companies put better offer. If there are no other companies to worry about, they happily retain high prices, and that's what happens in the US.