[gnoway]

Most US municipalities have a franchise agreement for a particular service. The franchisee has exclusive rights to provide a service in the franchised area. So there is often one cable tv provider and one wired telephone provider in an area. This naturally leads to one cable internet and one DSL provider. Some areas do also have a fiber provider (Verizon FiOS, Google Fiber).

These same areas are often also serviced by wireless providers, either cellular, satellite or some other kind of fixed wireless.

Note that while DSL tends to be available in every market, it may not actually be available at your home due to distance from the CO. Or it may be available but you're so far away that the performance would not be worth what it cost.

So the problem is that there's a clear hierarchy of what's good in any area. Where I live it's cable > DSL >> wireless/satellite. Compound this with the pricing structure: where I live it's wireless/satellite >> cable == dsl, with cable having some speed tiers that DSL can't match. At the end of the day, for any consumer trying to make a decision on value and performance, there's often really only one option.

I'm going to assert that this is how it looks for the majority of the geographical US. I'm not sure about the larger metro areas.