alt Hacker News> - The United States is 85 times larger than Switzerland. The entire country of Switzerland is the size of a small US state. Covering the US with broadband is much harder than Switzerland.
I see this argument come up a lot with regards to all kinds of infrastructure, and the thing is it simply _isn't true_.
What matters is population density, GDP per capita, geography, and will. A countries size doesn't matter since twice the area will, all things being equal, also give you twice the workforce to make it happen. In fact the only change a larger area typically makes is better ability to make use of economies of scale, which makes things _easier_.
The only correlation between larger countries and trouble with infrastructure is that a large country is more likely to have large areas with nearly nobody in them, but these areas also typically account for a vanishingly small percentage of the population so they don't really count when people are talking about bad infrastructure.
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Population density is the thing people are talking about when they say that. It's 6 times higher in Switzerland than in the US.
> A countries size doesn't matter since twice the area will, all things being equal
It will never be both objectively and subjectively equal. Even the geographic is already difference, the weather, then there is people, wealth, etc.
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Wrong, there are scaling problems. Have you ever worked at both a very large and very small company? Were things that were easy at small companies much harder at large ones?
If the least populated 3% of Switzerland's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, no one would care because it's just a single frozen mountain.
If the least populated 3% of the USA's geographic area didn't have internet access at all, people would care because it's the entire state of Wyoming. Okay, most people wouldn't care, but some people in Wyoming would.