[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.