Europe is way more dense than America, just look at any light pollution map and compare. Europe has also a LOT of previously built roads that make deployments way cheaper.
Once you take that into account, the ISP market in the US is not that dysfunctional, it’s just that economies of scale matter too much.
A lot of European countries have far lower population densities that the US, but still better infrastructure and broadband.
The US just is that dysfunctional.
The problem in the US is that distances are way longer.
When building networks the geographical extremities of the nation do not matter, only the distance to the closest point of presence.
Europe and the US are not that dissimilar in geographical extent or population density, so neither of these can be used as convincing arguments for American exceptionalism.
The fact remains that the US is just that dysfunctional compared to Europe.
Also in the US, the availability of high speed, low cost fiber options versus slow, expensive copper can be accurately guessed based on nothing but the median home price in a neighborhood. When fully occupied apartment buildings lack fiber but not the townhomes across the street, "population density" is not a satisfactory explanation.
Because 5G is expected to be more profitable than fiber and deploying fiber would require more CAPEX.
I’ve also never seen convincing evidence that US is really worse on average than other large countries— Germany, France, Italy, Spain. All the speed test rankings place us around the same.
When you consider pricing—you need to consider average income. ISP costs are mostly tied to local wages. So you can’t compare US prices to Romania.
That isn’t what is holding up fiber deployments to residential houses.
The two largest economies in Europe have always had inferior Internet speeds to the US. France in particular has spent decades as a badly lagging second class Internet citizen on speeds. As recently as four years ago France was one of the absolute worst places in the affluent world for Internet speeds, while the US has routinely ranked near the top dozen affluent nations (competing mostly with far smaller nations, with far greater population density concentrated in a few major cities, such as Switzerland or Norway in the case of Europe).
They think it's any better in Europe? In the places where it is better it's because the government has given the isps a lot of money. Money that would be much better spent elsewhere, as I believe if you want good services you have to move to the cities - you shouldn't ask the rest of the country to subsidise your lifestyle.
Then look at Germany, they're squeezing up to 300 Mbps out of copper (really impressive tbh, but it's no fiber) and 4G is atrocious. The UK fairs much better in both. Spain seems to be quietly ahead of both in fiber.
It's all about people and politics, not technology or distance when it comes to good Internet.