That really explains only small parts. Even the horrible suburbs have little real reason to be that expensive. In the end it is really about lacking actual free market and enabling corporate capture as voted by the voters.
> the US is geographically huge and more sprawled out.
There is ample historical evidence that this is a poor excuse.
Long ago, leaders in the US understood the value of universality. You'll likely recognize this as the Network Effect, Metcalfe's Law, etc. Back in the day, they called this "universal service." That thinking was central to the policies established for both electrification and phone service in the US: it wasn't then, and isn't now, truly universal, but what could be feasibly accommodated was, even when costs were/are quite high.
It wasn't lost on the people of those times that such policies inherently meant the cost of including sparsely populated, distant areas would be subsidized by concentrated areas. Before those systems appeared, the founders welded the same thinking into the US constitution in the form of the US postal service, with exactly the same knowledge and concerns.
We've lost that. The change happened prior to the advent of the internet. You're free to attribute this to whatever you wish; I won't offer my view on that, except to say there are no innocents: every argument that fingers ebil capitalists can be countered by examples of urban leaders damning government policies that subsidize non-urbanites. What I know with certainty is, if packet switched networking was somehow a thing in the 19th century, availability would be a given for almost any structure more significant than a hunting cabin in the US today, complete with common carrier, service baselines and rates established with clarity.
That’s not the reason. The required build out has actually already been been paid for: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5.... But the US is so politically broken that corporations could just pocket the money without actually providing the infrastructure.
Why was that not a problem in the mid 1800s when we crisscrossed the entire country with railroads and telegraph cables?
Sure is funny how FDR had us spend a little cash 100 years ago to ensure even the remotest farm gets electricity, and we already gave ISPs a shitload of cash to do the same, but now "We can't" build telephone poles to rural places. Even though those same places already have telephone poles for power and telephone.
AT&T was able to leverage it's monopoly position and defense industry relationship to basically invent everything that runs the modern world (and were compelled to license those advancements out) while modern monopolies can't even dig some holes.
Sounds like we need some more "Consent Decrees" and a DoJ that makes large companies scared.
We damned every single river in the nation. We built so much railroad that it crashed the industry. We built those railroads purposely in places where nobody lived and then willed towns into existence around them. We built the interstate highway system.
Why can we suddenly not build anything? Maybe it's because people keep insisting, against all historical evidence, that we can't, and they don't even try.
I’m in Stockholm, and our condo HOA (BRF) includes 1Gbps per unit in the fee for all units because billing individually would cost more in admin than the service itself. We have FTTP and then cat6 to each unit.
That sounds really convenient! Is it a new building? I know the odd American or Canadian build will have that, but only the newer and more expensive ones.
But this is a pretty common setup for condos in Swedish cities. Rentals usually have access to the same infrastructure but at higher prices due to kickbacks demanded by the landlords from the ISPs.
The backbone of it all is a state owned fiber connecting the cities together with municipal fiber.
But even outside of the cities FTTP is quite common. There are companies which specialize in finding rural areas where there’s enough interest to justify the cost of connecting them and then coordinating getting an economic association setup to own and manage the local infrastructure.
This is something to underscore, US people always talks about how "big and sprawling" the US is, but there's fiber at my fathers house in Northern Sweden that's in an area with similar population density to Wisconsin or whatever rural US state you want to pick.
Some kind of city(iirc) managed fiber and he can switch commercial operators (And speeds/prices) by contacting them to get new terms, that's an actually free market.
Just did my internet contract for my apartment in rural Italy (a town of around 2k people in the Verona province). 1Gb symmetric is indeed 25EUR/month. I added a few stuff on top like static IPv4 and reached 32EUR/month.
I’m paying 100 bucks for 2.5gb fiber in socal. I don’t consider that expensive either. I’ve seen internet prices internationally and they kinda suck outside of some areas that have decent providers - but that goes for the US too.
