alt Hacker News>I see that it has a size of about 85.5 thousand square miles (and about 2 million people). >I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure.
That's the lie everyone in America likes to tell themselves - it's very easy to provide electricity and phone service to all these people, but somehow internet is not.
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In fairness, the phone network practically took a century to get fully set up, was quite expensive in its time, and it's pretty easy to run a dinky little wire pair to a house (sometimes they'd literally use barbed wire fences). And labor costs were a lot lower when the phone network was built out.
Electricity is genuinely hard and expensive, but we've accepted it as a basic need of modern life. Lighting, fridges, HVAC, kitchen appliances... People die if the electric grid goes down for long enough, but phones and Internet are a bit more of an optimization, a luxury.
Not disagreeing with your sentiment, though, just saying the scenarios are a bit different. Electricity and phone aren't "very easy", we just accept one as difficult but required, and the other (if you mean landline service) was already there and isn't really being maintained anymore.
>but somehow internet is not.
Look up DSL.
> it's very easy to provide electricity
America didn't achieve near-total electrification until 1960 or so. The farm my dad grew up on didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing until well into his childhood in the 50's, despite urban areas being mostly electrified in the 1920's.
The fact that I have fiber Internet service while living in a forest in a relatively rural area is pretty much a miracle by comparison.