[frik]

> France and Austria, unlike Canada are very much dense so the infrastructure required to setup an LTE/UMTS/etc network is less costly

You are wrong.

Both countries have parts of the country covered by the Alps, high mountains that make cell coverage expensive and several areas still have very spotty coverage with often very old GPRS/Edge-only cell towers.

Also there is a competition going on with more than four telecom companies competing that lowers consumers monthly costs (cell phone data plans).

Additionally the former state based telecom copper cables infastructure aged badly and hasn't been touched for 15 years and the fiber network infrastructure connects just big cities, bit not small towns in the Alps. In many areas cell connection is the only option to get 1+Mbit data connection, as the copper cable infrastructure hasn't been upgraded since the mid nineties.