Comment by tjwebbnorfolk
4 hours ago
There are a lot of things you can do in a rich, tiny, homogenous country that you can't do in a enormous, diverse country.
If my house were a country, I'd be in the top 0.1% of household internet speeds compared to other countries. Obviously everyone should be just like me!
> There are a lot of things you can do in a rich, tiny, homogenous country that you can't do in a enormous, diverse country.
The US is a large collection of a whole bunch of rich (by global standards), tiny, fairly homogenous areas. We manage roads and schools at state, county, and local levels; we could do municipal broadband.
The difficulties of American internet speeds have little to do with the total size of the country, but how far individual families are from each other. Spain is roughly the size of Texas, and Spain has a higher population, but you need a lot less fiber to each home, because metro areas are so much denser, and therefore it's so much easier to lay the fiber.
As usual, blame the suburbs, which make all kinds of infrastructure quite a bit more expensive per capita.
But the US has long lagged behind in even dense areas. It's more than just the distribution.
Right. It’s things like Baltimore (when I lived there) requiring that high speed internet had to roll out in poor areas first, before it could go into the rich neighborhoods.
But this was the early 2000s and the internet was still “new”. Only the richer areas cared and were willing to pay the price. Letting them have first (or even equal!) access would have made it easier to fund the rollout in low income areas.
Huge swaths of our densest metro areas, in our largest cities, do not have any fiber option, just one cable provider.
The NEC, which is the only area of the US that really has any density to speak of, does have pretty good fiber penetration.
https://www.reviews.org/app/uploads/2024/11/Verizon-Fios-cov...
> There are a lot of things you can do in a rich, tiny, homogenous country that you can't do in an enormous, diverse country.
US states are little islands entirely capable of doing things like building infrastructure. There is no excuse for our states and their lack of movement, certainly not “the entire country is just tooooo big. whoa is us.” nonsense.
Yes, that's true for population.
But all except 9 US states are larger in geographic area and only 5 have a higher population density.
Those are pretty salient statistics when you're talking about infrastructure that links houses.
Does New York have great home fiber infrastructure?
Rich is a key attribute here. Tiny, not really. The key is dense. That makes terrestrial connections cheaper. A country with the population of the US and the richness and density of Switzerland would be just as capable of building out high speed internet connections. It would have ~38x the population of Switzerland, cost ~38x more to wire, and have ~38x the resources with which to do it.
Incidentally, the northeast of the US has a similar or greater population density as Switzerland and is pretty rich. That area, at least, should be as capable of this sort of thing. Doing it for, say, everybody in Alaska would be a bit tougher.
I don't know what diversity has to do with anything here. As far as I've seen, people from all sorts of different places and cultures seem to like high speed internet about equally well.
Infrastructure is laughable in northeast. And no, we do not have competition here in NJ. Yay "free market"
>homogenous country
Tell me you know nothing about Switzerland without telling me you know nothing about Switzerland. Try asking a German Swiss what they think about a French Swiss or either about the Romansch.