This is the first in a series of three posts looking at the lessons for the United States from broadband deployment in other countries.

Bits readers have a serious case of broadband envy. I’ve been writing about the debate about how the government might encourage more high-speed Internet use and you’ve complained loudly that people in other countries have faster, cheaper, more widely available broadband service. Even customer-service representatives of Internet service providers overseas are nicer too.

I don’t know about manners, but it’s easy to find examples that American’s broadband is second-rate:

In Japan, broadband service running at 150 megabits per second (Mbps) costs $60 a month. The fastest service available now in the United States is 50 Mbps at a price of $90 to $150 a month.

In London, $9 a month buys 8 Mbps service. In New York, broadband starts at $20 per month, for 1 Mbps.

In Iceland, 83 percent of the households are connected to broadband. In the United States, the adoption rate is 59 percent.

There’s more than just envy at stake here. President Obama campaigned on a promise of fast broadband service for all. On the White House Web site, he writes “America should lead the world in broadband penetration and Internet access.” And the recent stimulus bill requires the Federal Communications Commission to create a national broadband plan in order to make high-speed Internet service both more available and more affordable.

I’ve spent the last week trolling through reports and talking to people who study broadband deployment around the world to see what explains the faster and cheaper service in many countries. We’ll start with where the United States isn’t doing quite so badly: the basic speed of broadband service.

If you take out the countries that have made significant investment in fiber optic networks — Japan, Korea and Sweden — the United States is in the middle of the pack when it comes to network speed.

The large European countries have average download speeds ranging from 3.2 Mbps in Italy to 6.4 Mbps in Germany, according to a study by the Saïd Business School at Oxford. The United States has an average speed of 5.2 Mbps. The study looked at speeds in May 2008, as measured by consumers checking their connections on a Web site called Speedtest.net.

Japan was the standout, with an average speed of 16.7 Mbps. Sweden was 8.8 Mbps. And Korea averaged 7.2 Mbps.

Urban density explains much of that disparity. In most of the world, by far the most common way to deliver broadband is DSL technology that sends data over copper phone lines. The shorter the length of the wire from the phone company office to your home, the faster the service can be delivered. The first generation of DSL could offer speeds of up to 7 megabits per second. The very latest generation offers up to 100 Mbps for very short distances.

The reason you see offers of DSL service in many European countries of 10 or 20 Mbps, sometimes more, is that in densely populated urban areas, the telephone companies have been able to wire homes using shorter connections and thus faster speeds.

Half the population of South Korea lives in very dense apartment complexes, mostly in or near Seoul. And most of its very fast broadband service has been delivered by fiber connections into the basements of these buildings, then delivered by fast DSL up to each apartment.

In the United States, phone companies could have offered a faster tier of DSL service to urban apartment dwellers. But instead they chose to offer slower speeds that they could also offer in the suburbs, where most of the more affluent customers live.

There’s another thing to keep in mind while comparing Internet speed: truth in advertising. Data from Ofcom, the British communications regulator, shows that advertising from Internet providers in the United States overstates the speed of their broadband connections less than providers in Japan and the major European countries. (See Figure 10 in this study.)

Even without any change in government policies, Internet speeds in the United States are getting faster. Verizon is wiring half its territory with its FiOS service, which strings fiber optic cable to people’s homes. FiOS now offers 50 Mbps service and has the capacity to offer much faster speeds. As of the end of 2008, 4.1 million homes in the United States had fiber service, which puts the United States right behind Japan, which has brought fiber directly to 8.2 million homes, according to the Fiber to the Home Council. Much of what is called fiber broadband in Korea, Sweden and until recently Japan, only brings the fiber to the basement of apartment buildings or street-corner switch boxes.

AT&T is building out that sort of network for its U-Verse service, running fiber to small switching stations in neighborhoods, so that it can offer much faster DSL with data speed of up to 25 Mbps and and Internet video as well. And cable systems, which cover more than 90 percent of the country, are starting to deploy the next generation of Internet technology called Docsis 3.0. It can offer speeds of 50 Mbps, and eventually much more, compared to a maximum offer of about 16 Mbps on today’s cable systems.

In the United States, high broadband speeds have brought even higher prices. The new 50 Mbps service costs between $90 and $140 a month. My next post will bring us to the question of why broadband costs so much more in the United States that in other countries. On prices, unlike speeds, those tantalizing reports from overseas are correct.

By the way, if you want to follow along, you can wallow in too much data comparing international broadband networks at these sites: The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Point-Topic, the Technology Policy Institute, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, and DSL Prime.

There are a lot of places and a lot of policies, so I’ve condensed a lot of information. Many of you know much more than I do about the state of each foreign market. So please add your experiences in the comments.