It appears the author lives in Germany. In my experience, Europeans who haven't visited the US (I don't know if he has or not) often have a hard time grasping just how HUGE the country is. It literally spans an entire continent east to west. In Europe, you can usually drive to another country's border, or the coast, within 4-6 hours (sometimes more depending on where you are). In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state. I heard about one German auto engineer who was visiting Los Angeles. He looked at a map and thought it would be a fun drive to go to Portland and back on a Saturday. He was shocked when his American colleagues told him to look at the map's scale more closely, and that it would be more than 24 hours of driving just to get there and come back.

So yes. Regulations certainly play a part, but so does geography.

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lefra 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

European here. Maybe I'm not typical, but I know that the contiguous US is about as large as the EU (around 4000 km from one side to the other). And if you need 24h to get to the other side if a state, you're either on dirt tracks in Alaska, or got stuck somewhere in the worst traffic jam ever. Texas is about 1000km wide, just like the larger european countries, that's a 10 to 12 hour drive.

	▲	3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		[deleted]

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GolfPopper 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The immense geography doesn't matter as much as you might think, because very few people one lives there. The Mountain West and Great Plains are largely empty and most of the people who do live in them live in a small number of urban and suburban areas. I think geography is an overused excuse for America's poor delivery of residential internet.

	▲	hibikir 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's a geographical difference, but it has little to do with the deserts, and more to do with the actual density of where people live, where the US is also among the least dense in the world. Those suburbs with 0.3-0.5 acre lots, roads that need to be everywhere and quite wide, extending every distance, just aren't standard worldwide, and increase bespoke infrastructure costs. In a denser place you need more capacity in the fiber bundle, or larger pipes on a sewer, but that's a much smaller problem than the miles of infra. Go look at a density map by the square km, and compare any American metro to, say, a Spanish metro. You find denser square miles in Spanish towns under 500k than you would in Kansas City, Phoenix, Houston... and that lowers all kinds of infra costs. It's not really the miles of desert, farmland or anything like that.
	▲	esseph 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Now thing about all the single houses on multiple sq mile plots and the fact that a $40-$100 subscription is never going to pay back the millions it took to get to each of those homes. There are tons of those. I've lived in several states like that.

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yxhuvud 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you can manage to have plumbing and electricity, you can manage to have proper broadband.

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Nursie 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state

Which US states can you do this in? You can drive across Texas from El Paso to Port Arthur in 12 AFAICT. Alaska maybe?

Now Western Australia where I live ... 36 hours from Cape Leeuwin to Kununurra, and we only have 10% the population of Texas.

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carlosjobim 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> In parts of America, you can drive for 24 hours in the same direction without even crossing into a different state.

I used to have a car like that also.

	▲	initramfs 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		A slow one? Me too.

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kamranjon 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It takes longer to drive the length of Sweden than it does the length of California.

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SXX 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

There are big countries with a good internet. Russia was one before it started turning back into totalitarian shithole.

	▲	usrnm 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To be fair the situation with the Internet in deep rural Russia was never great. Not everyone lives in a city.