Part of the problem is that when you point out things like this, Americans on the Internet frequently react as if you are insulting their nation and invent nonsensical reasons for why their Internet must be slow.
Nobody likes to hear that they are lower on the priority totem pole, however, everybody understands when new businesses go after the biggest markets first.
If somebody is going to be upset by investing first in the areas with the most people...then you really have to disregard their point of view.
I live in a rural suburb and have had one of those cell-phone-over-ethernet setups in my house to handle the poor signal. I understand.
From my experience, Americans care very much about what speed and reliability is available within their neighborhood. They care very little about access outside of their neighborhood.
Their relative differences are factors in the comparison. The US also has smaller administrative units you can compare with other countries with appropriate caveats.
1. There is a vast difference in population density, total population size, and total land mass, as discussed up thread.
2. Switzerland has a homogenous culture that has been extant for several hundred of years at a minimum and you could make an argument for over a thousand years. The western half of the US wasn't settled by Europeans until 150 years ago.
3. The U.S. has had both massive immigration from abroad as well as massive internal migration for the last 200 years. Aside from a few cities in the north east and south, there is essentially nowhere near the level of cultural continuity in the US that exists in most European countries.
4. Aside from the shared language, the cultural differences between various regions of the US are akin to the differences between Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe. Do Hungary and Germany agree on most political issues? Do Sweden and Italy?
5. The US culture is dominated by a settler/pioneer mentality because, up until about 50 years ago, if things weren't great wherever you were, you just uprooted yourself and moved West to find new opportunities. Nobody has been able to do this in Europe at a comparable scale for 1000+ years.
6. Switzerland does not have anywhere near the level of racial heterogeneity that the U.S. has. Not only does the US have a huge, underprivileged ethnic group that is descended from slaves, we have obtained a new huge underprivileged ethnic group in the last 60 years.
[edit] 7. Almost forgot to add: most US infrastructure, especially on the West Coast, was built during the automobile era.
So, no, they are not even remotely comparable.
I'm surprised someone on HN would make such an overly broad, and with it, inaccurate statement.
Personally, I've seen a lot of debate. Not all of it constructive, but rarely (if ever) anything like "omg, you bastard. #murica ruelz"
They'll usually have some irrelevant statistics. Presumably total population, total surface area, some other such superficial analysis.
I never engage in these discussions. This is the first time, and probably the last. But I've seen them time and time again.
You must be new here!
Sure, something can be said about inherent community biases and the like, but it doesn't change the fact that minority opinions are drowned out many times while noncontributing noise is upboated bc it pokes fun at America, Trump, Bezos, or whatever boogeyman exists.
But here we arw
I pay $435/month for my office and home internet as well as 3 mobile phones.
In Canada I pay a total of 88$/month for home internet and 2 mobile phones, with the internet being high capacity and pretty fast even for large data transfers.
That is CAD as well, so that's about 66$ USD
About a year ago, FOA was contacted by Greg Turton of Cordele, GA. who was curious about what was involved in creating a FTTH network. Greg is a real estate developer who also owns several local hotels. Where he lives and builds homes is way outside of a service area that anybody wants to build good broadband, forget FTTH. Cordele itself has a population of only about 15,000 and is one of those small cities along the Interstate highway that are everywhere in the US.
We answered Greg's questions and led him to some of the FOA Guide web pages and YouTube videos about FTTH to get him started. More conversations discussed how to get connections as an ISP, types of components and suppliers, etc. Fortunately the local electrical utility has lots of fiber but they were restricted from building their own FTTH network because Georgia was one of 19 states where lobbyists for the incumbent providers got laws passed restricting their ability to operate a FTTH system themselves. But they were more than willing to lease dark fiber to Greg at really good rates. And there were good choices on getting an Internet connection.
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Sure, your FM radio would stop working, but that's a small sacrifice to make, to get actual competition in something as important as telecommunications.
In our neighborhood, we're waiting on Spectrum to finish their infrastructure install. We were initially in talks with AT&T to come in too, but they backed out when we couldn't do community agreements (beyond easement) again and we wouldn't agree to them using the existing infrastructure (which was terrible) from the previous provider below. No other provider, asides from HughesNet, is willing to come in now that there is a non-exclusive agreement with Spectrum for easement access. Moral of the story, companies aren't going to act with consumers' interests at heart. Didn't Charter or someone have some agreement where part of some merger approval required that they built out into rural areas? A requirement they didn't comply with?
The provider we had before was absolutely terrible with $90/month spent on a basic DishTV package + 3Mbps internet. They had an exclusive easement, but due to constant outages because the infrastructure couldn't support the community, we were able to finally get out of it after 6 years and lots of lawyer involvement. FCC wouldn't get involved, but having the government take a more active oversight role would be a good thing, in my experience.
I'm not saying that radio use can't be regulated. I'm saying that FCC is the worst possible organization that could be imagined to do that regulation. To understand that, simply compare Europe to USA.
Good idea, I was just thinking that I hate how emergency services can talk to each other, and my cellphone works. People are so damned soft, they should have to release a homing pigeon if they want to call 911! Sure, a few people might die and life will be a dark and terrible nightmare of RF interference, radio astronomy will end, and modern civilization will grind to a halt, but that’s a small price to pay for my libertarian wet dream.
Please don't discuss your wet dreams in this forum.
One has 327 million people and an area of 9.8 million square kilometers (36 people per Km2). The other has 8.4 million people and 41 thousand square kilometers (216 people per Km2).
Switzerland has one of the highest and fastest internet penetration rates in Europe. If you rent an apartment, cable is often thrown in as part of the cost. The rest of the people's landlines are ADSL (which isn't very fast unless you use the latest ADSL2 dslams), or VDSL, which you can only get if you're very close to a CO. Finally, fiber is easier to roll out when you have a smaller population in a smaller area.
Most Americans cannot get VDSL, and the DSLAMs are old. Cable is pretty fast, and fiber is slowly getting rolled out, but it's a big freaking country, meaning this is expensive as hell.
The mobile providers in Switzerland only have to provide a very small number of broadband equipment and mobile towers compared to that needed to cover the US. Also, the same equipment used in Switzerland covers up to 6x more subscribers, because of increased population density.
The US has to provide much more equipment and installation over a much larger area to cover a comparatively smaller number of subscribers. So you have to literally buy more equipment to cover more area, and then you make less money because the equipment covers less subscribers on average. Upgrading the equipment then also becomes significantly more expensive.
One is extremely expensive, time-consuming and difficult to cover with high speed broadband, the other is not.
One has 327 million people and an area of 9.8 million square kilometers (36 people per Km2). The other has 8.4 million people and 41 thousand square kilometers (216 people per Km2).
Okay, but here in Sweden, with a population density of 22 people/km2, my mobile 4G internet plan has unlimited data, unlimited calls and messages for $55/month. I use it for both my phone and my 4G router at home. It's my only Internet connection since I live in a very rural place (a village of ~150 inhabitants in the north). I get about 13 Mbps downloads -- it would be much better if I was closer to a tower.
In cities in Sweden, which are all very small and not very dense, you can usually get 100 or 1000 Mbps fibre connections for something like $40 a month.
I am also not aware of a single cell data provider in Sweden that has ever tried to disable or charge for tethering.
In Wyoming, USA, the population density is 2.31/km2. But 100% of the people can get at least 10Mbps internet, 79% have >25Mbps internet. But again, big states, bigger country, and due to both governmental differences, differences in internet providers, and the different costs of providing service in different regions, we don't spread the cost of service out evenly.
It looks really easy when you're looking at the problem from 40,000 feet. On the ground, it's much more complicated.
I don't get the deal with tethering here, either, but I think there are probably reasons for it. If any provider here just threw tethering in for free, while undercutting the cost of the competitors, people would flock to them. The fact that this doesn't happen means it's probably hard to make money on it, for reasons unknown.
Currently, for $45, the best you can get on T-Mobile is 4GB of unlimited-speed tethered data, and for $70 you can get 512KB/s tethering. The cheapest mostly-unlimited data plan (including fewer limits for tethering) for one line costs $95. Older plans, which had cost less and had less limits, have been mostly phased out.
Another sad irony is to get the cheaper plan, you have to get a credit check, which dents your credit score, just to acquire a "pre-paid" plan. Also, T-Mobile's website seems to have been scrubbed of their prepaid plans, so probably you can only find details via interrogating their salespeople.