[hibikir]

It's a geographical difference, but it has little to do with the deserts, and more to do with the actual density of where people live, where the US is also among the least dense in the world. Those suburbs with 0.3-0.5 acre lots, roads that need to be everywhere and quite wide, extending every distance, just aren't standard worldwide, and increase bespoke infrastructure costs. In a denser place you need more capacity in the fiber bundle, or larger pipes on a sewer, but that's a much smaller problem than the miles of infra. Go look at a density map by the square km, and compare any American metro to, say, a Spanish metro. You find denser square miles in Spanish towns under 500k than you would in Kansas City, Phoenix, Houston... and that lowers all kinds of infra costs. It's not really the miles of desert, farmland or anything like that.

[Hikikomori]

Yeah that sounds impossible. How are these places able to get power, sewage or water? Do they all just have solar panels in their huge backyard or something? Did they just get the Internet with starlink?

[danaris]

...For rural places in America, at least, they don't get sewer or water lines run to them. They have a septic tank and a well.

Power lines are significantly easier to run than water/sewer.

[Hikikomori]

The guy I responded to didn't describe something rural though.

Heard about every excuse possible in this thread. Cities are too dense, can't put fiber in the ground. Suburb yards are too big so not enough density. Rural have too much distance.

As if these things doesn't exist in Europe at all. In reality they do, we don't have fiber everywhere but we for certain have a lot more of it in areas that matches all excuses given.

Guess what makes it real easy to build out fiber? Whenever you're already digging for power, water, sewage, roadwork, whatever, you put some fiber down. But "efficient" capitalism doesn't work like that I guess.