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Comment by icantthinkofone | Hacker News Reader

South Korea is smaller than my state of Missouri. Now let's see how fast the US can provide broadband speeds if they dumped all their resources into my state alone.

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I doubt SK is "dumping" all the resources of the USA into its broadband infrastructure. But that's beside the point. USA telcos/cablecos have had ample opportunity to provide decent service. The whole time, they've been coddled by government regulation. When the regulators screwed up and allowed too much competition (e.g. UNE-P) the telcos squealed and the pain went away. Telcos/cablecos don't like government-run competition, because they don't like competition, full stop.

So then why doesn't New Jersey do this? It is smaller than SK and has comparable population density: 1288 vs 1171 per sq mi. Or how about NYC? Or LA? People keep bringing up USA size or density statistics when talking about government run utilities, but there are plenty of places where they could work given a will to invest in public infrastructure.

Because in the US, planning and zoning falls not under the fed, not under the state, but under the city/county level. In Korea, the fed basically said, nope, we're going to approve this everywhere.

Why do you think google fiber is so selective? Because it is a regulatory nightmare for google to get the unbelievable amount of paperwork done for approval. Even for cities that want to work with google, a lot of them still aren't really able to due to the amount of bureaucracy and red tape required to pass planning/zoning committee muster for each county/city/etc.

The state doesn't do it. Public companies do and most of them don't service just one state or city.

South Korea has about half the per-capita GDP of the US. Why would you think the entire resources of the US would be necessary to give Missouri similar infrastructure?

Forget SK and MO for the moment: how about San Francisco? It's got some of the highest population density in the country (18K people per sq mile), which is 208 times the density of MO. But the city government of SF is more than happy to pass on the buck to ATT, with its shitty "Uverse".

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