Obviously you meant terabytes! 2TB/month I think is a lot to expect from a $40/month connection. The economics of that, in reality, is that your lower usage neighbors are heavily subsidizing your bandwidth costs.
You can drive across remote parts of Norway, Sweden etc and have 20mbit+ 4G (probably more if you had a high gain antenna).
Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry.
That 20 Mbit/s driving across remote areas probably wouldn't even hold true for Switzerland.
But yes, overall I'd say the US definitely has worse home internet infrastructure (though it's unfortunately still not as bad as some other developed countries).
Sometimes I think Europeans have no real idea of how large the United States is. We have single states larger than several countries and single states with larger populations than several countries.
- Norway is 148,728 square miles with 5.258 million people.
- Sweden is 173,860 square miles with 9.995 million people.
- The United States land area is 3,531,905 square miles with 327.2 million people.
Of course we have a lower quality of infrastructure, 2 of our 50 states are individually larger than Sweden. California is larger than Norway with nearly 8 times the population
It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though.
We're not talking about the outback.
The internet isn't limited to a big city though, everything isn't mirrored in each large population center, that data has to cross vast distances.
And population density increases the need for more and more cable to be deployed, if you're feeding a podunk town of 5,000 people but NYC has 28,000~ people per square mile, San Francisco 19,000~ people per square mile, Chicago 11,600~ people per square mile.
Population dense areas are going to have a higher data consumption, a higher data consumption means you need that much more infrastructure at any given moment to handle peak.
Then factor in the United States has the 3rd largest number of internet users in the world, an estimated 292 million [1] and it is much more difficult to serve them all with the same level of service in a country orders of magnitude smaller with orders of magnitude fewer people.
The only country in Europe that begins to compare in both population and size is Russia at 1.8x larger land area and 44% of the population. Comparing physicall ysmall countries with 5-15 million. There are only 15 countries in Europe with populations over 10 million people, and only 1 of them (Russia) begins to come close to the US in size (being itself larger). The second largest country in Europe being The Ukraine and it's smaller than Texas.
You simply can't compare internet infrastructure in a random European country to the United States. It's like saying "Smart Cars get 40mpg, I don't see why NASA's Crawler-Transporter can't do 40mpg too, sounds like bad design!"
- EU land area is 1,728,193 square miles with 508 million people
In the UK my ISP (which has excellent service but a small customer base, so it has actual quotas, not a faux "unlimited" service with some hidden usage policies) charges £45 pcm for the cheapest 200GB quota and £55 pcm for 2TB quota. So that means 1.8TB of quota comes to £10 pcm end user cost (ie that has their profit and taxes baked in). Maybe much less difference than you realised.
In the US at scale I think it would be around $5,000/month. That gives you peak capacity of 3PB but you can’t expect anything like perfect utilization.
With a bit of hand-waving I would guess your provider’s transit cost is on the order of $3-5/TB/month...
Even if EU geography brings this down to $1/TB/month, they are losing money on you. I seriously doubt it’s going to be on the order of $0.10/TB/month for transit.
Contrast this with AWS bandwidth costs in Europe!
AWS is what bandwidth costs look like when it’s a profit center.
I would certainly expect residential lines, with the extreme overhead of operating the service, to be priced closer to AWS rates than to baseline commercial transit rates.