alt Hacker News> Jokes aside, I guess population density is just not the main factor in internet. It’s competition, it’s regulation, it’s corruption, and pop density is simply not a deciding factor.
Sort of?
If you're going to provide wired service in rural areas at all, doing it with fast fiber isn't a significantly different maintenance cost than using the old stuff, but it has a high one time cost to transition from copper to fiber. The cost of doing that is more like per-mile than per-customer, which makes the per-customer cost a lot higher where there are fewer customers per mile. There are areas rural enough that nobody would spend the money to run fiber even if there were no regulations at all.
Whereas for NYC it's just unambiguously corruption and regulation destroying competition.
But in rural areas, Verizon, at the very least, is deliberately neglecting their copper, and not replacing it with fibre.
For people whose service degrades or stops working entirely, what do they offer instead?
Wireless. Which has much higher margins and much looser regulations around it.
At least for a while, Verizon was sending very strong signals that they wanted to get out of the wired connection business entirely, so they could do exclusively wireless contracts, including for your home broadband. (I don't know if that's still the case.)
This isn't a matter of "oh, it's really hard and really expensive for these multi-billion-dollar megacorporations to install wires going out to those rural areas!"
It's a matter of corporate greed, pure and simple.