Are american high prices the result of scummy pricing on the corporations' side or is it an actual infrastructural issue that prevents the ISPs from providing cheap connections to everyone?
In the US, many people have only one choice for an Internet/TV/phone provider. Some have two choices. It is exceedingly rare to find a place with three choices.
Telecoms are typically granted local monopolies. As a result, they can charge pretty much what they want. And they do. Even in markets with a duopoly, companies very rarely attempt to beat each other on price, it's not in their best long-term interest to (but I doubt they are outright colluding).
The only places where it is more expensive than the norm to build out is in more rural areas... but the telecoms sometimes don't build out there at all, so some people are stuck with whatever they can get with a copper phone line, or satellite Internet if they can afford it (that's very expensive as well).
In my area - Optimum wants $50 for 60/25, plus $10 to rent a modem monthly, plus other taxes and fees (most of them made up) that are nigh impossible to find out beforehand. For TV and phone as well, $90 plus rental fees for the router and required boxes for each TV However, Optimum is terrible at my particular house, but we're one of the lucky ones who can choose Verizon as well. Verizon wants $70 for 100/100, reduced TV service, and phone, plus all the fees above. The telecoms push the bundles very hard.
As you can see, this shit's expensive (adds up to $130).
In Baltimore, I paid about $50 for a 50mbps connection, or about 20x more than a subway ticket. Sounds like the ratio is about the same order of magnitude in Ukraine.
[1] A telecom field technican in the U.S. makes about $6,000-$7,000 per month, plus benefits. That's about 20x what the average Ukrainian in Kiev makes (according to the Internet).
[2] Fares on D.C.'s metro, which similarly cover only about 50% of costs, range from $1.75 to $5.90(!).
I'm not sure that's true. Let's say it costs VeriCast $500/year to maintain a single home's landline and broadband connections (including the stuff in the street), for which they charge the customer say $700 per year. Do they really have one employee per 200 connections (assuming $100k full-loaded cost per employee)? That would be 500,000 employees in the USA, if 83% of households have broadband. That's about the total number of employees of ComCast, Verizon and AT&T. But those folks provide other services (like cellular service). Where is my math wrong?
Even we accept that it is true, it's not relevant, because the price paid by the customer is as much about the willingness of customers to pay, as it is about the running costs.
Even if we believe it's relevant, because the price customers are willing to pay vary with local incomes, experience tells us that local incomes don't tell us the whole story. People in London pay less for broadband (~$300 per year for phone and broadband, including taxes[0]) than those in San Francisco. I don't see how that is explained by labour costs.
Furthermore, labor costs are not about maintenance, but rather about investing in the infrastructure. And this doesn't translate directly into the price. They make way more money on that infrastructure in the long run.
Well for one you aren't adding in contractors. The people actually building the network aren't typically direct employees. The usual pattern is spend a ton of money to build out the network, earn it back through a number of years and then use the added cash flow to expand once more. Wireless networks are what the money is going to right now.
Regardless, you can look through all the various telecom quarterly reports to see where the money is going. They are for the most part profitable endeavours, but not especially lucrative (AT&T's latest quarter had a 8.67% net profit margin compared to 22.68% for Google).
Given your quoted numbers, the price in Ukraine is actually higher at 5% of a monthly salary.
Of course the US doesn't have a monthly minimum wage (not sure how that works in Ukraine) so many people in the US might only have part time jobs paying the minimum hourly wage, hence they make considerably less than $1200 a month.
UPDATE It seems to be even less today at $5-10: http://money.cnn.com/2016/04/22/technology/access-from-att-d...
It's strange that the article doesn't mention this.
Combine that with large regions of low population density and a lot of land, and we have very little competition in the vast majority of the country.
In the US, we get the downside legacies of a monopoly without the benefit of government control.
The last mile and regional infrastructure (poles, mostly) is owned by private interests, who tend to be dicks about sharing. There's also a regulatory tension between the Federal government and state governments.
But why is it relatively more expensive? Have Indian companies rigged the rules such that they don't have to compete with each other? I thought Indian labor was relatively inexpensive.
Overall, I don't understand what's going on with Indian ISPs. For example, my traceroute to qoo10.sg (hosted in Korea) reveals traffic going from Bangalore to Delhi to London to Fremont (US) to Japan to Korea. For various other places that are supposed to be close by, I see traffic going all the way to Delhi and then coming back.
I think the demand for broadband is still very low here, and so, unoptimal strategies (from a network packet's POV) are good enough for our ISPs.
I've lived in very affluent neighborhoods that have access to a single, shitty, ISP. So even when you can afford the inflated and outrageous prices you're still at the mercy of an incredibly corrupt and poor preforming corporation.
Of course, not all components of the prices translate proportionally. Salaries probably do, equipment probably does not.
2) A network engineeering position that might cost a company $115,000/year in the US could be filled for $35,000/year in Ukraine.
3) Eastern european ISPs are much more "Adventurous" in terms of the low cost network equipment they use for core infrastructure. $1500 Mikrotiks in the same role where a US ISP would use a $15,000 Ciscos or Juniper. Building five to six nines uptime core router POPs with fully redundant -48VDC A and B power is not cheap.
Well, unlike US ISPs, they try to compete on price and there is a lot of competition. They kind of have to be much more adventurous in terms of cutting down costs of network equipment. But they also compete on quality, so it has to satisfy that too or you are out.