Free with a 20 something quid a month Sky plan and BT phone and with a fairly small data cap (there was a Sky pamphlet in a Magazine I get from the UK). Still cheap, but not 'free'.A 4mbps plan for free?
I just moved from paying $50 for 256k unlimited to $50 for 50GB of 1500k.
The US suffer from a lack of competition in all but major markets, regional US is just as bad as many other countries, and in some places you can only get Dialup and Sat.
As for Korean/Japan comparisons. Think of their internet as having a huge LAN across the country and then a 56k connection outside. It might be really fast for local sites, but the rest of the internet is just as slow as it is in most other countries, or even slower. Of course seeing as they'd mostly look at in language content, outside connections aren't as important as they are in the English speaking world.