alt Hacker NewsNot a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference.
I have lived in both Europe and the US. And I have installed fiber internet commercially.
When I lived in Italy, the best internet I could get was DSL, while a few years before, in the US, I had cable internet at more than 3x the speed.
Likewise, there are still rural communities without access to truly high speed internet in the US, as I'm sure there are in Europe.
The big telcos were broken up in the US decades ago. Now you have a few major providers who collude, and a bunch of small regional providers just trying to turn a profit.
The large providers service so many accounts it costs billions to upgrade the infrastructure at their end -- before even rolling out last mile to consumers.
And for the regional providers, its not worth the cost to upgrade both their infrastructure and the last mile infrastructure.
Also, population density is not the same thing in the US as it is in Europe.
US large cities are sprawling. European large cities are not.
It is far less expensive to service a large city in Europe than a large city in the US.
> Not a fair comparison. 30-40x population difference.
I've always found that argument puzzling. A population 30 times larger also means roughly 30 times the technicians, funding, and resources etc.
Although, you have a very good point that internet speed is not everywhere good in Europe. Maybe that is what you are getting at? One can pick a place Europe with great internet speed, but one can also find places in Europe with terrible internet speed. In that sense it is a mixed bag just like the US.