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Comment by fabian2k | Hacker News Reader

The US has around 15% of the population density of Germany. It's much easier to provide broadband to larger cities than to rural areas.

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Norway has overall low population density, and seems to do fine.

148,729 mi² vs 3.797 million mi²

15 people per square kilometer (Norway) vs 34 people per square kilometer (continental us).

With corresponding higher amount of people to do the cabling. (Which is still irrelevant, nobody complains about the lack of gigabit ISPs in the Rockies or the Wyoming countryside, they complain that you can't get it in coastal or midwestern suburbia where the vast majority of Americans live.

They have a ridiculous amount of oil for their size.

That being said, they've also done a pretty good job in managing that money (which is rare for natural resource rich countries).

The population spread of Norway more closely resembles that of Canada than that of the US, though. It's very difficult to inhabit large swathes of land in the north and center of Norway, so most people live in the southern and western parts of the country near the coast.

In the US, on the other hand, remote places are a lot more inhabitable. There are just more remote towns in the US, with more people owning more land and being spread out more as a result.

Of course, this doesn't excuse the fact that some dense towns in the US a few miles from a major city still have to deal with shitty broadband because no ISP is willing to invest in hooking them up to FttH. On average, though, the US will probably do worse than Norway for the foreseeable future because of the difference in where and how people live.

Okay, and how's the internet out there, in the more rural parts of Norway?

But yeah the bigger issue is that often even in urban or suburban areas, the internet is still bad.

Sure, but US has higher urbanisation rate. There's just no excuse not to link up your urban areas.

That’s disingenuous. You don’t need broadband in the middle of the desert where there is no population. You need it in cities and towns where the density is much more similar to Europe etc.

That's true, but the USA is famous for huge, sprawling suburban rings around its cities (vs Europe where the impression is far more 'inner city apartments').

I guess it might be also pretty hard if it's city centre full of old buildings.

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