I heard someone argue that because original phones rolled out in the US much earlier and more broadly, we spend all this money on copper wiring. Because Europe didn't have as much, they transitioned to fast cellular quickly. Being first does not mean you will be best certainly.

Europe? I heard that about Asia and Africa, maybe post soviet Eastern Europe, but not Europe in general. We had telephones...

> Because Europe didn't have as much...

Europe isn't the developing world. There are countries in SE Asia that put the US to shame in terms of the speed, quality and cost of their internet. I'm literally in one now at a random cafe where I'm getting 400 Mbps down and 500 Mbps up while sipping a $1.75 cup of coffee.

Cheap excuses. It's like saying Europe started without asphalt streets so we don't have it. Building/upgrading asphalt street is order of magnitude more costly than cable yet majority of streets aren't dirt and stones

The issue lies in willingness to upgrade and cutting costs on end users

Dude, this is what Stockholm looked like 1890 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Stockholm_telephone_tower.

2009 we made it a national strategy that 90% of the population should get internet access via fiber and by 2020 we’d reached 63%.

Here’s a map of our broadband coverage https://bredbandskartan.pts.se/.

The US had a similar strategy and basically paid $400 billion for the same buildout but got nothing in return and no one was held accountable https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5....

In Europe local calls were generally never free, and in many countries getting a line/handset installed in your home was an onerous and expensive task. In more socialist/ex-bloc regions it was generally down to how much social and political capital you could muster.

European telecom providers typically charged for local calls on a per-minute basis, often with connection/establishment fees. US telecom providers did it on flat-rate bundles at worst.

For the same reason, Europe completely skipped pagers as an interim step between landlines and mobile connectivity outside of specific on-call jobs like Medical practitioners.

Much more of an incentive to divest yourself from a copper network designed for voice traffic that was not cheap, fast, or available in many cases.

An unlimited calls, data and SMS 5G SIM in Ireland runs you about €15/monthly on a Pay-as-you-go basis. You tend to get about 20-50GB of Roaming Data in the EU bundled.

https://www.eir.ie/shop/mobile?simonly=true https://48.ie/ https://shop.gomo.ie/mobile-sim-only https://www.clearmobile.ie/

Um, Europe had pretty ubiquitous copper phone wiring long before cellular became a thing.

Many developing countries, however, were able to leapfrog the wired phones stage.