I heard someone argue that because original phones rolled out in the US much earlier and more broadly, we spend all this money on copper wiring. Because Europe didn't have as much, they transitioned to fast cellular quickly. Being first does not mean you will be best certainly.
Major campaigns to install telephone lines took place in the run-up to and during the First World War. This enabled civilians and conscripts who were not trained in the use of radio to communicate with headquarters.
There were literally regiments drawing up lines as the troops advanced.
Europe isn't the developing world. There are countries in SE Asia that put the US to shame in terms of the speed, quality and cost of their internet. I'm literally in one now at a random cafe where I'm getting 400 Mbps down and 500 Mbps up while sipping a $1.75 cup of coffee.
South Korea isn't the developing world neither (at least since the mid 90s), but 10 years ago I could barely read HN on the subway in Berlin while I saw people watching YouTube on the subway in Seoul.
Cheap excuses. It's like saying Europe started without asphalt streets so we don't have it. Building/upgrading asphalt street is order of magnitude more costly than cable yet majority of streets aren't dirt and stones
The issue lies in willingness to upgrade and cutting costs on end users
Oh certainly. I'm not saying that "we did it so it should be just as easy for you". But neither having an existing copper network nor being sparsely populated is the reason for why the US does not have extensive fiber coverage.
In Europe local calls were generally never free, and in many countries getting a line/handset installed in your home was an onerous and expensive task. In more socialist/ex-bloc regions it was generally down to how much social and political capital you could muster.
European telecom providers typically charged for local calls on a per-minute basis, often with connection/establishment fees. US telecom providers did it on flat-rate bundles at worst.
For the same reason, Europe completely skipped pagers as an interim step between landlines and mobile connectivity outside of specific on-call jobs like Medical practitioners.
Much more of an incentive to divest yourself from a copper network designed for voice traffic that was not cheap, fast, or available in many cases.
An unlimited calls, data and SMS 5G SIM in Ireland runs you about €15/monthly on a Pay-as-you-go basis. You tend to get about 20-50GB of Roaming Data in the EU bundled.
No they weren't - they were billed by the minute. About 5c/min in new money. That's why you had things like night and off-peak tariffs for 56k dial-up services in Ireland in the early 00s.