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Comment by TweedHeads | Hacker News Reader

Meantime, we suck...

Thanks to BigTelcos

I think it has to do more with policy than it does with the telcos. Japan, Korea, and Sweden are outliers which have had massive funding (direct and indirect) from the governments to build up their broadband infrastructures. The hands-off, let the market decide, strategy of the previous Republican administration has led to the largest commercial fiber deployment in the world (FiOS), but it isn't as far-reaching or speedy as the government-assisted rollouts. When you look at penetration rates and bandwidth capacities of different nations, the US is in the middle of the pack.

Don't forget that local area monopolies on cable haven't helped any either.

Well let's not just blame them for this.

Also blame them for the disgusting state of our cell phones!

Again, that's the government's fault for not setting communication protocol standards. Free markets != absence of regulation w/r/t public airwaves.

Of course, it could be worse. We (the U.S.) could be Canada.

Setting standards too early can be worse. I remember reading that some countries set an analog HDTV standard in the 90s and ended up changing over again to digital at great public expense.

Also France's Minitel fiasco in the 80s and 90s.

Even if the US had mandated GSM I think we'd still have the same locked, crippled phones and such from the carriers.

To be fair, also blame the fact that the area of the US is 25x that of Japan (10x if you count just the lower 48).

According to your figures, alaska + hawaii is 15x the size of japan, and thus 1.5x the size of the lower 48 states. that's wrong.

(Hawaii: 28,311 km²)

Alaska: 1,717,854 km²

Other 48 states: 8,080,464.25 km²

Japan: 377,873 km²

Now we calculate:

(28,311+1,717,854+8,080,464.25)/377,873 = 26.0051108

8,080,464.25 / 377,873 = 21.3840741

So, the whole US is 25x, but "contiguous 48", as wikipedia calls them, are only 20x.

whoops good call, I knew that didn't seem right. I was looking at square miles for the contiguous 48 and square kilometers for Japan.

We = ?

The United States, naturally.

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