If you look past the rhetoric at the actual statistics, I think it's pretty clear that at the median, the internet situation is about the same between the two countries.
Now, within the bottom 15-20% I'm fully willing to bet Internet access and speed is worse in the U.S. than in Finland, but so is pretty much everything else. We have higher income inequality and more systematic poverty. The U.S. has about 20% of children in poverty versus less than 5% for Finland. Nothing really unique to internet service.
I think we agree upon Finland being substantially different with regards to universal broadband access. Only looking at the median (which is pretty useless for assessing universal service) the US might come off better.
Broadband statistics for the US are of notorious bad quality, so any findings are to be taken with a grain of salt. The FCC statistics are useless and unless the NTIA statistics have been published in full and vetted then I'm inclined to put them into the category of wishful thinking.
The World bank data is also not comparable since it uses both narrowband and broadband access to tabulate Internet access. 92% of Finns have a broadband internet connection (see previous post for primary source). How many Americans have the same is an unknown quantity based on the data.
The key point is that Finland is inclusive with regards to broadband access while the US is exclusive.
I don't think you can actually reconcile that with the available data.
> 92% of Finns have an Internet connection
Yes, 92.4% of Finns versus 87.4% of Americans: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER.P2?order=wba....
> Fast broadband (100 Mbps or faster) is actively promoted and developed by the government.
Maybe so, but access to 100 mbps connections is pretty much the same between the two countries: http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/10/finland-plan-for-uni... ("Parantainen also provided government figures showing half of all Finns currently have a 100Mbps connection available to their door."); http://www.ntia.doc.gov/files/ntia/publications/usbb_avail_r... (see table on page 5, showing 47% access to 100 mbps+ wired broadband). Both are 2012 data.
According to Akamai, average speeds are pretty much the same too: http://readwrite.com/2014/10/08/us-broadband-speed-global-ra... (11.7 mbps for Finland, 11.4 mbps for U.S.)
Also according to Akamai, average peak connection speeds in the U.S. (a good measurement of the total capacity of the link) are slightly higher in the U.S. https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/report/aka... (40.6 mbps versus 36.5 mbps).
If you look past the rhetoric at the actual statistics, I think it's pretty clear that at the median, the internet situation is about the same between the two countries.
Now, within the bottom 15-20% I'm fully willing to bet Internet access and speed is worse in the U.S. than in Finland, but so is pretty much everything else. We have higher income inequality and more systematic poverty. The U.S. has about 20% of children in poverty versus less than 5% for Finland. Nothing really unique to internet service.