[esseph]

Now thing about all the single houses on multiple sq mile plots and the fact that a $40-$100 subscription is never going to pay back the millions it took to get to each of those homes. There are tons of those. I've lived in several states like that.

[rmunn]

That's the most important thing, really. The geography — that America extends the width of a continent — is secondary. BUT the geography is, in part, what allows all those single houses on large plots of land. Because American suburbs can sprawl out without meaningfully cutting into the amount of available farmland in the country, which isn't the case in most smaller countries (where suburban sprawl, at least to the same proportional extent that it happens in the US, would have a meaningful impact on available farmland). Hence why America's average population density, total population divided by total country area, is so much lower than other countries. We have megacities where the population is highly concentrated — New York City's population density is over 11,000 people per square kilometer, comparable to Geneva's 12,000 people/km². But America's overall population density is one of the lowest in the world. (Not the lowest: both Canada's and Australia's are lower, for example, in both cases due to having so much land that nearly nobody lives on, either tundra or desert).

But those suburbs that sprawl all over the place? That's a WHOLE lot of capital investment, far more than other countries (on average) to hook each home up because you have to lay down so much more fiber. Hence why fiber rollout has been relatively slow: I remember in 2006 reading about fiber going in in certain cities, and looking up whether it was available in the suburb where I live, and the computer lookup system giving a very polite "LOL, no, not for years" (not that they said "not for years" but I could read between the lines). But now it's available. Not anywhere close to 25 Gbps, though.