[callmeal]

>I see that it has a size of about 85.5 thousand square miles (and about 2 million people). >I've never understood the value in comparing relatively densely populated European countries to America. The practical realities of each just make them quite different in terms of basic utilities and infrastructure.

That's the lie everyone in America likes to tell themselves - it's very easy to provide electricity and phone service to all these people, but somehow internet is not.

[zdragnar]

> it's very easy to provide electricity

America didn't achieve near-total electrification until 1960 or so. The farm my dad grew up on didn't have electricity or indoor plumbing until well into his childhood in the 50's, despite urban areas being mostly electrified in the 1920's.

The fact that I have fiber Internet service while living in a forest in a relatively rural area is pretty much a miracle by comparison.

[charcircuit]

>but somehow internet is not.

Look up DSL.

[ipdashc]

In fairness, the phone network practically took a century to get fully set up, was quite expensive in its time, and it's pretty easy to run a dinky little wire pair to a house (sometimes they'd literally use barbed wire fences). And labor costs were a lot lower when the phone network was built out.

Electricity is genuinely hard and expensive, but we've accepted it as a basic need of modern life. Lighting, fridges, HVAC, kitchen appliances... People die if the electric grid goes down for long enough, but phones and Internet are a bit more of an optimization, a luxury.

Not disagreeing with your sentiment, though, just saying the scenarios are a bit different. Electricity and phone aren't "very easy", we just accept one as difficult but required, and the other (if you mean landline service) was already there and isn't really being maintained anymore.

[callmeal]

I know it's hard - but I was referring to companies taking tax dollars and not doing anything with it:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/10/att-took-283-mil...

>AT&T falsely told the US government that it met its obligation to deploy broadband at more than 133,000 locations in Mississippi, state officials say.

>Since 2015, AT&T has received over $283 million from the Federal Communications Commission’s Connect America Fund to expand its network in Mississippi. But the Mississippi Public Service Commission (PSC) said it has evidence that AT&T’s fixed-wireless broadband is not available to all the homes and businesses where AT&T claims it offers service. The PSC asked the FCC to conduct “a complete compliance audit” of AT&T’s claim that it has met its obligation

So it's that we cannot do it, it's that it's more profitable to say it's "difficult" to do it and then lie about getting it done.