That argument might be valid if there were no urban areas in America. However it fails to explain why, for example, New Jersey does not have affordable 25 Gbit residential internet either. It is half the size of Switzerland but has similar population and much more favorable geography. And even if you wanted to only look at a place like Idaho, the explanation (and solutions!) provided by the article is even more applicable to places where building infrastructure is hard/costly.

Claiming the lack of healthy competition in the ISP space is because of (geography|population density|[a-z]+) is a prime example of the defeatist attitude in which one seeks to explain/excuse problems instead of even trying to address them. I've started noticing this pattern more and more after Evan Edinger pointed it out in a video (addressing some American comments on his videos): [1]

> We all default to what we know, that is just very natural. The problem is when new information arrives and instead of sitting with it and thinking about it, we immediately reach for any reason that it must be wrong. Because if it's wrong, nothing has to change.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDyPHGZCmNE&t=17m17s