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I often see people commenting on the poor quality of America’s internet compared to European countries, but how much of that is due to the physical size of America? I imagine it’s much more difficult to build out a larger network especially when many parts of America are not very populated.

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Looking at the countries above the USA... They all mostly have one thing in common, their populace lives almost entirely within a few primary concentrated areas. It is much easier to build out the infrastructure to only support a handful of major cities which certainly helps raise the average.

edit: I want to make it clear that I think the fact that I can get gigabit internet in a town of 300k smack in the center of "flyover country" is absolutely amazing. I think that the USA competes with these other countries despite the size disadvantage is nothing short of astounding.

The top 3 - Singapore, Hong Kong (SAR), and Monaco - are smaller than Rhode Island, the smallest state - even when you add them together.

My gigabit internet in HK was similarly priced to my gigabit internet in suburban USA (like US$80/mo). That said, in HK areas with robust competition between ISPs, some of the offerings were shockingly cheap. A friend of mine got 10Gbps for less than US$100/mo after negotiating. I don’t remember if HK lines were symmetric or not - my US line certainly isn’t.

Note that symmetrical gigabit connections in the US are sometimes available. Its highly dependent on the type of network deployed. If its a PON deployment there's a good chance you're going to get a symmetrical connection (AT&T, Verizon, Frontier Fiber). If you have a coax connection (Spectrum, Comcast, Cox), there's little chance its symmetrical.

For example, at my home on a residential PON connection a recent speedtest today showed ~990Mbit down, ~978Mbit up. At my office's new business coax connection just a few miles away, I usually get ~980Mbit down, 30Mbit up.

LOL they are smaller than the Dallas/Ft. Worth area alone!

I live in Baltimore - could certainly be considered a city - internet speed is appalling even with "business service".

Yup, but I wonder why there were bandwidth issues in Europe when the pandemic first started (video streaming services started throttling bitrate very aggressively in Europe) but there were no issues in the United States.

Perhaps the last mile average is slow but the overall infrastructure and backbone is more robust in the US (this would make sense historically as well)

Wireless internet is more common in European and Asian countries because you can put up a few towers and be done, it gets throttled when you have congestion.

America has fiber and mostly copper (from our phone line laying days) strung all throughout America, the bandwidth is much higher in total.

The job left here is replacing copper w/ fiber (or at least DOCSIS 3.1 via copper), but it's expensive and some ISPs it isn't worth it for the customers they have, so you have some areas bringing the national average down.

Starlink will be nice for really remote areas where it make no sense to run a line or a tower for a couple customers. Existing sat internet is unusable. There's also been a big push to modernize slightly bigger towns with fiber by smaller ISPs.

As far as I can remember, the stress was mostly put on exchanges more so than overall capacity. I'm not aware of any real degradation beyond the panic in the news about « running out of Internet ».

There was no issue in Europe either, it was a political decision, not a technical one.

While density may be part of it, my (admittedly: anecdotal) experience in splitting my time between Los Angeles and the nearby mountain communities over the last year is that LA broadband speed is consistently 5 times slower.

This is the usual argument against doing large infrastructure in the USA, and I think it’s kind of missing the point: the USA also has much larger financial and physical resources than those countries. We also have counterarguments: we have a universal electrical network. We built a large railroad network across the entire country. We have an interstate highway system reaching every continental state (and with “interstates” in Alaska and Hawaii as well, if I’m not mistaken). Also, universal telephone service.

I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I can’t get cell reception at my house. I have basic broadband, but I can’t get fiber despite being on a street where other houses have it.

I would be very interested in a comparison of what the citizens of each country have paid to fund internet service. US taxpayers have given the telecom mono/duopolies a ton of free money and right-of-way and the providers have broken every promise to provide universal service in exchange.

Railroads, highways, and power/cable lines all go hand in hand. It's an amazing network and they were all built a long time ago with little improvement. The problem is shoveling money to other "universal" slush funds while ignoring actual infrastructure for decades. ISPs should have been a utility and they should treat it like Texas treats its grid. Have a company that manages the actual lines, and have multiple providers that can compete and sell data on it.

> they should treat it like Texas treats its grid

like garbage that falls apart when people actually need to use it? or like a regressive money funnel to line the pockets of an oligarchical captured regulatory body?

texas' power grid is not a goal any serious advocate can advance as doing anything right.

If you're referring to the 100 year winter freeze, yes maybe it should have been winterized, and they are now, but that's not what I'm talking about.

Maybe all California homes should have A/C for these heat waves. Sometimes it doesn't make sense economically.

I'm talking about having a transmission provider and having ISPs compete on the same lines.

It keeps prices down (unless you tricked into buying variable wholesale via startups like Griddy) and it keeps lines in good shape.

Uh, no. The Texas grid is not winterized now.

They’ve pledged to start work thinking about doing something, sometime soon, maybe.

That’s about as far as they’ve gotten.

Texas' grid is the reason why 100% of the dollars I spend on electrical energy goes towards renewable energy sources at $0.084c/kWh for energy+transmission. What do you pay and what mix is renewable?

Texas' grid also makes it incredibly easy for you to get your local solar/wind connected to the grid to sell your electricity back, further incentivizing local and renewable energy production.

Finally, when Texas' grid has issues with big events which knocks out power, it captures national headlines for months on end. When California has blackouts, its just California being California.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2021/06/25/blackouts-loom-in-cal...

Maybe there's more states than just Texas having to deal with the effects of climate change.

>Finally, when Texas' grid has issues with big events which knocks out power, it captures national headlines for months on end. When California has blackouts, its just California being California

Meanwhile, the other 48 states, including a tiny island and a giant tundra wasteland larger than Texas have no problem keeping their power on in adverse weather.

I have family in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and other states. They've definitely lost power in major snowstorms before, sometimes for multiple days. I've lost power from hurricanes and other kinds of weather events elsewhere. Losing power from big weather events isn't an incredibly uncommon thing.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/weather/over-1-million-lose-pow...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/death-toll-rise...

https://weather.com/storms/hurricane/news/2020-08-06-isaias-...

Were you really trying to suggest the other 48 states never lose power in extreme weather situations?

The differentiating factor is that most states at least attempt to prepare and design for the understood risks, unlike Texas. I'm not saying other states do not lose power in extreme weather events, but the weather that hit Texas was closer to a ten year event than a hundred year event

You literally stated:

> have no problem keeping their power on in adverse weather.

It sure reads like other states have no problem keeping their power on and not other states sometimes do lose power as well but hey at least they're trying. And besides, hurricanes hit the East Coast pretty dang often and yet still hundreds of thousands of people will lose power. Sure sounds like they're not trying hard enough if they should have no problem keeping the power on.

Also, as someone who has lived in Texas for 30 years, this storm was absolutely not a ten year event. It may become one with the changing climate, but I have never experienced an ice storm quite as extreme. The major winter storm that happened ten years before was still not close to the one this year. For the one ten years prior, most pools didn't freeze over. Even with the pumps running on my pool, I had nearly an inch of ice form. I've never seen it get that cold in Texas.

Something like this was actually tried in the '90s for local phone circuits ("local loop unbundling"). As far as I know, it basically worked and is technically still policy, but the type of access mandated is no longer competitive for most purposes.

> USA also has much larger financial and physical resources than those countries

Certainly not on a per-capita basis, as far as Norway and Luxembourg are concerned.

Now take those same countries and look at GDP, number of publicly traded software companies, and capital investment provided by governments. There is some valid critique about how poor the USA is in terms of bandwidth. Not to mention cultural appropriation by most Americans of "being the best" at everything. Thus there's a reason (maybe not 100% valid) why people complain the USA isn't #1 on this list.

The thing about rural America is nobody lives there. More than 80% of Americans live in urbanized areas, the same fraction as France, Norway, Spain, and the world generally.

The reason America doesn't have broadband or trains is not because of its extent, it's because our war budget is $2000 per capita per year.

"Urban" in the US can still be quite different from "urban" of Europe or other places around the world.

I live in a really close suburb of one of the biggest cities in the US. I technically live in an "urban" area, and places further out from the actual city that are less dense are still considered "urban". The population density here is ~4,000 people/mi^2. A similar comparison to Paris location-wise would be something like Le Blanc-Mesnil, which has a density of 18,000 people/mi^2. Both of these are considered "urban", but they are extremely different kinds of cities density-wise.

"Our urbanized places are garbage" is a completely different statement from "our country is large". One of them is circumstance and the other is self-inflicted.

Whether or not "our urbanized places are garbage" is very much subjective. I don't consider the place I live to be garbage, personally I prefer it to living in a place as dense as Paris.

Whether you think US "urban" areas are garbage or not, your statement doesn't change the fact that "urban" in the US versus "urban" elsewhere can be pretty radically different. Saying "more than 80% of Americans live in urbanized areas, the same fraction as France, Norway, Spain, and the world generally" is kind of comparing apples and oranges. Yeah sure 80% of the population lives in locations labeled "urban", but the average densities of those urban areas in Europe are much more dense than the US. I'd imagine there are plenty of places in the US classified as "urban" which would easily compare to the densities of "rural" areas in Europe.

I do agree with the idea that a partial part of the problem is a lack of focus on infrastructure spending compared to other budgets such as the military. Hopefully that will change soon.

As far as I can tell it's not that America as a whole has bad internet, it's that we mostly put modern cable/conduit/equipment in neighborhoods that are either new or rich. There are places where brand new fiber and rusting DSL are separated by 100 feet.

I would like to see some metrics that take into consideration landmass, population distribution, grid scale, or the like. Singapore's road network is roughly 3500km vs the United State's 6,850,000km.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...

I live in a semi-rural area, on a dirt road off the highway with 15-20 other neighbors on our half-mile stretch of street. Until Starlink hit, the best internet we could get was 500kbps unmetered, and maybe 4mbps metered if you were lucky. It was genuinely that bad.

I think you're highlighting the huge challenge of American broadband. Every dirt road off every highway that has a dozen or two homes needs broadband -- that is an immense amount of infrastructure that's needed.

Do they have electricity? I'm betting "yes". This means there are either above ground poles that fiber can be hung from, or if it was constructed in the last 30 years, the ground was opened for trenching, and a fiber should have been buried along side the power (wou'da, cou'da, shou'da). Dig once policies and pole sharing policies have been fought tooth and nail by the entrenched utilities.

I can attest you can find bad internet in small cities just the same as in rural places.

Sure, size is a factor, but it's not the only factor, nor is it the main factor. The main problem is monopolies.

While it's a point that intuitively makes sense, I'm not too sure of its true relevance. The US is just too rich for size to be an excuse. At least it can't be the only reason. It may be anecdotal, but all the complaints I've ever seen about broadband/fibre in the US have been in relation to local monopolies and the general fragmentation of the nation-wide network. In most EU countries, we have laws that force network owners to mutualise (they have to allow third parties to deploy the "last mile" so that people can pick any ISP within three months of a new local). Infrastructure and commercial operations are legally separate. I think the US would benefit from something like this on a federal level, at the risk of being called communism.

> The US is just too rich for size to be an excuse.

We have access to cable internet and shortly fiber (from Metronet). We have some friends in an established (and not poor mind you) neighborhood not 2 miles away that doesn't even have cable run. They can't get ANY internet if it's not wireless.

It baffles my mind.

I think the issue is that the problem is being generalized into a 'one size fits all' sort of problem. When the issue is a bunch of items. Rural is an issue. But so is duopolies. So is poor competition. In the year 2000 I could pick from 20-30 different ISPs. Now I can pick from basically 3. Woe unto you if those 3 decide it is going to cost you 20k just to do a hook up or just say 'not available' even though all of your neighbors have it.

That's because the government forced Bell/AT&T phone lines to be leasable by other companies. Cable and fiber lines are _not_ required to have that kind of competition, which is why Comcast often delivers the only high-speed connection in a suburban area and can price gouge you.

Cable had that for a small time. But I think maybe 2 other companies actually did it. It is a mess and a lot of it I suspect is as you suspect. I think DSL lines had the same thing for awhile too but that got removed as well.

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