[rdtsc]

It is a large country and has existing infrastructure. It is hard to compare US to say a West European country and look at internet speeds or LTE coverage. US is just much larger so looking at geographical coverage it doesn't look good at all.

The existing infrastructure part is companies will refuse to update their system for as long as the existing one kinda works. Sometimes with only 1 or 2 companies covering a region. If both stay at 3G, the customer basically doesn't have a choice. So no need to upgrade.

If it was an African country, without an existing network, they might choose to jump to the latest technology (like some skipped installing wired phones and just went to cell phones in the past). In the chart Khazakstan and Uruguay is perhaps in that category.

In the speed category Romania kills it with 30Mbps. That's pretty cool for being a relatively poor European country.

[snaily]

> It is a large country and has existing infrastructure.

The latter part is the real elephant in the room here - the former reason is by now a cliché putdown when it comes to infrastructure investment in the US. Kazahkstan and Uruguay are not small, even less dense than the US, and poorer - yet have better LTE coverage.

[rdtsc]

But they fall in the other category -- probably didn't have an existing infrastructure already. So no backward compatibility worries, no need to throw away an existing investment if it already makes money.

[Synaesthesia]

Same with South Africa. We're a relatively poor country, very large and sparsely populated, but doing quite well on the LTE scale, although we are known as cellphone mad over here.