Dialup to ADSL to cable to Fibre and back to ADSL?

It might seem like I have my priorities all wrong but one of the areas I've been reading up on is the state of connectivity in Australia. I was idly wondering what kind of services were offered by the ISPs operating Down Under.

Average Download Speeds in Mbit/s

You can find the complete data set provided by Internet Society at this link. They have data for Internet penetration rates, affordability, 3G coverage and more but I only wanted to focus on the average download speeds.

The map's a little small so I'll post the data for a few countries.

Ranked 1st - Singapore with download speeds of 97.67 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 78.69 Mbit/s

Ranked 2nd - Hong Kong with download speeds of 96.12 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 89.25 Mbit/s

(showing ranks 3 and 4 to show the disparity in speeds from ranks 1 and 2)
Ranked 3rd - Romania with download speeds of 62.53 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 31.85 Mbit/s

Ranked 4th - Sweden with download speeds of 49.25 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 27.66 Mbit/s

(skipping a whole bunch of countries to find a few familiar names)
Ranked 14th - Korea
Ranked 21st - USA
Ranked 23rd - UK
Ranked 31st - Japan (really?)
Ranked 34th - China
Ranked 36th - New Zealand
Ranked 40th - Thailand

Ranked 46th - Australia with download speeds of 15.73 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 3.89 Mbit/s

(for the sake of contrast)
Ranked 144th - Niger with download speeds of 0.6 Mbit/s and upload speeds of 0.2 Mbit/s

Now I realize that even though we're enjoying such high speeds in Singapore, we are most of the time not utilizing such speeds all of the time and neither do we need that kind of extraordinary speeds in our daily lives.

I did not realize though that I would be taking a step back in time. I remember when we had to use dialups to connect to the Internet (the one with that weird scratch connection sound) and the progression to fibre broadband now in Singapore. That's not readily available yet in Australia judging by their rollout map. So when we do go over, I guess it's back to ADSL or Cable broadband then.

The other peculiarity in Australia (or maybe it's Singapore being peculiar) is that even for fixed broadband, there is a data cap. I've been on a unlimited data plan for as long as I can recall - even to the days of dialup connections.

For comparison sake, here are some sample plans from both countries.

Singapore;
1) Singtel - Fibre - 1Gbps with unlimited data - SGD$50
2) M1 - Fibre - 1Gbps with unlimited data - $39.00
3) Starhub - Fibre - 1Gbps with unlimited data - $49.90
4) MyRepublic - Fibre - 1Gbps with unlimited data - $49.90

Australia; (prices seem irrelevant of whether you are signing up for ADSL/Cable/Fibre technology)

1) Optus Yes - NBN (Fibre) - with unlimited data - AUD$100
2) Engin - ADSL2+ - with unlimited daya - AUD$50

Not sure if Australia has state specific plans or the providers provide the same plan to the whole country. Would be great to find out more here.

It looks like some compromises have to be made here, either settle for an older tech - ADSL - I still remember conversations with Singtel technicians about copper wires :p or pay more (double!) for a similar service to what I am getting now. Maybe this is a call to change the way my family consumes data.

Whatever the choice, it's going to be  interesting going forward