Audible is designed only for those in the USA

I have been using the Audible app on my phone for about a month. I found the idea of audio-books very appealing and it sort fits very well into my lifestyle. The usage statistics it provides is a great motivating tool. However there are some issues that have immensely added to my frustration levels, what adds insult to injury is the reaction of the customer service. But before I get into that let me talk about the problem:

1. Exceptionally slow downloads when downloading directly from Audible

- The download speeds are incredibly low and often fail. Downloads of similar sizes don't take this long for any other app on my phone and the problem is specific to my Audible. (It took me some effort to convince the tech support that the issue had nothing to do with my network quality).

Audible downloads at a ridiculous 10-40 Kb/ps and suffers from frequent failures

iTunes download occurs at more than 1MB/ps

2. Usage data unavailable with iTunes titles

- So as a work around I started downloading titles from iTunes. But by doing so I don't get access to added functionalities like Chapter info, usage info when listening in the background etc etc.

So after figuring that the issue wasn't at my end I contacted the tech support to find a solution to my download woes. After considerable effort I was finally able to convince them that the problem had nothing to do with my network connection. And this is the final answer I got from them.

Based on your address, I see that you are in Singapore. As you may know there are plenty of factors that would affect the download speed. Factors include speed of the connection, your location versus location of the servers, amount of users using the same connection, the route the connection takes to get from your phone to our servers. When you download, the route that a connection takes to get from your phone to a particular server will not always be the same for every content provider. The Audible servers are solely based in the US. It's possible that Apple has servers closer to your location resulting in the faster download speed compared to us.

And while on international tech-support call to these guys one of them gave me the above explanation and then said that problem is because "Audible is designed only for those in the USA" (Not the exact word but the intent was the same). The point he made was that the Audible server resided in the US and the distance between the server location and Singapore is the reason for the slow speed and they can't do anything about it.

Now I am not exactly a techie but the explanation seems quite unsatisfactory for the following reasons:

1. My home network speed is very good and this slow speed is a consistent issue.
2. The same file downloaded to my computer (Presumably from the same distant server) at a speed that was about a 100 times faster than the mobile app.
3. Amazon servers present only in the US is not a very sound logic esp since they are going all out to sell AWS in this part of the world so aggressively.

I have had a great experience with the App post the download phase, so I will continue to use it irrespective of whether these guys give me a solution or not. But the moment I have an alternative I see no reason why I shouldn't switch to a service that is also for those lessor mortals outside USA.