When you consider the standard of living we have in Australia and then compare the quality of our internet to countries that have a much lower standard of living than us ours still falls short by quite a bit.

Luckily where I live they are still going ahead with supplying NBN at some stage and I can't wait but the current ADSL2+ that majority of people have available is so far behind the times. For example I have to monitor/fix most IT issues in our office and if we have 1 person uploading a semi-large file to the internet it brings everyone else to a halt.

Have a look at this for average download speed rankings:

http://www.netindex.com/download/allcountries/

Unfortunately the biggest problem we have is the size of our great nation.