[chillingeffect]

Not to defend large telcos, god knows i hate them myself, but one of the big differences between the US and Europe (besides us being drooling, knee-biting, mollified king-and-celebrity worshiping consumers with no comprehension of the meaning of our own rights) is geography. Historically, networks of all kinds, including energy and data have a longer gradient to reach rural areas which necessarily incur larger costs and more capital to roll out. I think this should be factored into it, but accounts for less than 50% of the difference. We're friendlier to monopolies ("Hey! They earned it! dur") in the U.S., too.

[Declanomous]

Case-in-point: You can get incredibly inexpensive service if you use a provider which only serves urban areas. People will complain that they took a road trip and didn't have service for 6 hours though.

This is one of the reasons why CDMA is/was much more popular is the US than elsewhere. CDMA requires fewer towers than GSM for equivalent geographical coverage. This is what allowed Verizon (CDMA) to advertise that they covered so much more of the United States than AT&T (GSM) did.

[vbezhenar]

Kazakhstan is a huge country with an extremely low population density. I'm paying $20/year for 20GB/month mobile traffic (calls are not included, there are plans for that, but I don't call much). Coverage is not perfect, but all inhabited localities are covered and major roads too.

[sharpneli]

Finland also has really low population density. Yet I'm enjoying 20€/month unlimited 50mbps data and some minutes and sms (never ran out).