It's so homogeneous that there are 4 national languages, one of which is german with tons of loval dialects. It's so homogeneous that each canton has own sub regulations. It's so homogeneous that in it's biggest city, Zurich, 34% of people are foreigners and 45% born outside of Switzerland.

But we can look at the opposite part of spectrum - Moldova, poorest country in Europe - 85% of infra is covered by fibre, >90% of population has option to get 1GBit fiber

There are always reasons why something can't be done, just like solving frequent school shooting problem in US

The US being different is no excuse - this is really just a shortsighted retelling of American Exceptionalism.

Intelligent folks look at a system and figure out ways they can adapt it to their own situation. You can take systems they use for rural areas and figure out ways to do it on your own. The US is enormous, but most folks live in cities. States are tiny portions of the US, and some of those states would likely mirror Switzerland in diversity, density, and size.

It wouldn't matter if the country had a population density similar to the US and was similar in many ways. It'd still need adaptation because of the differences in culture, laws, and so on.

> 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.

Switzerland is one of the least homogenous countries in Europe! Four languages, relatively weak federal government with strong local (canton) governments. Most state services are handled on a localized (canton) level.

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.

> 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.

Many US states are richer than Switzerland, what's their excuse?

Homogenous? Tell me you don’t know anything about Switzerland without telling me…

>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.

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.