[danielweber]

I think there is one reason and one reason alone for this.

If there's "one reason," it's because the US is spread out. Of the countries with faster consumer Internet speeds than the US, the biggest in area is France, which is less than a tenth the size of the lower 48.

That said, local governments often suck. A few months ago Google just gave up on putting Google Fiber into San Francisco.

Take a quick gander into the deals the ISPs cut with local government. Prepare to be disturbed.

Could you show us the example you have in mind?

[logfromblammo]

The limiting factor is not land area, but the marginal cost to serve an additional subscriber. It isn't the size of your graph, but the total cost of your spanning tree. The numbers involved are linear distances and number of nodes, not areas.

In most areas of the US, pre-existing infrastructure, such as improved roads and utility easements, makes serving additional customers relatively low cost. But monopolies and commodity suppliers operate at different supply points. A monopoly will intentionally reduce output below the point where marginal cost equals marginal revenue, to achieve higher prices and economic profits.

Leaving aside the concept of natural monopoly, that's the one reason. Most telecom markets are a local monopoly. Service sucks because the company providing it makes more money that way.

Land area and population density are red herrings. You need to measure the size of existing networks, such as roads, electric power, potable water and sewers, and divide those by the number of people served.

To use a car analogy, think about the Autobahn-style Interstate highway system. Before and after it was constructed, places remain the same absolute distance apart. But afterward, traveling between those places could take more or less time. Places that were previously adjacent might now require a detour via an overpass, whereas places previously distant might both have convenient on and off ramps. Travel times by car are thus determined by the roads network topology and not purely geographical distribution.

[danielweber]

Land area and population density are red herrings

No, when trying to wire up a population, population density really really matters. The #1 and #2 countries for Internet speed are Singapore and Hong Kong.

[logfromblammo]

Only in the sense that high population density makes minimal spanning trees very small indeed. The area simply is not relevant for wired coverage. Wireless links are another story, obviously, where antennas define a coverage area, but as long as the bits go through linear fibers, it simply does not matter how large someone's back yard is, or how far it extends from the front door. That area is irrelevant to the provision of service (unless someone lives on the other side of it).

The fastest data networks are wired, and even the wireless networks have linear backhaul.

By topology, a high-rise apartment building where everyone is within 100m of the utility closet on their floor is not all that different from a small town where most houses are within 100m of Main Street. The apartments have smaller area because people are stacked on top of each other. The total length of the cables and the equipment at the distribution nodes are still what matters.

You are removing a step in the causality chain. High population density causes efficient networks because all high-density areas incorporate their vertical space, by necessity. High-rise apartment and office buildings make it relatively easy to wire up a lot of people all at once.

But low population density does not necessarily imply a costly, inefficient network. The correlation between the two is stronger at the dense end of the scale. In the case where information about network topology is not available, population density may be used as a less accurate substitute, but your conclusions will likewise be less accurate, especially at the lower end of the scale.

Probably a closer approximation could be reached by looking at aerial photos of the places under comparison, adding up the total length of visible streets, and dividing population totals by that number, to get people per street-meter rather than people per square-meter.

[warfangle]

> If there's "one reason," it's because the US is spread out.

Stop trotting this meme out. It's false.

South Korea invested 1.08 billion over about six years, from 1999 to 2005. They also deregulated, primarily around competition - direct competition is allowed between ISPs there (it is not here, usually due to locally determined monopoly status).

South Korea has a landmass of approximately 100,000 square kilometers. Which calculates out to about 10,000 invested per square kilometer.

From the mid 90s to the mid 00s, internet service providers received a sum of over 200 billion USD (some say as high as 300 billion USD) in direct and tax subsidies, with the understanding that they would build out fiber to the home. It never happened, for various reasons. But the point is we already tried subsidies to get it, and it didn't work.

According to the 2010 census, there are 486 urbanized areas and 3087 urban clusters. UAs are 50,000 or more people, UCs are at least 2,500 and less than 50,000 people. Pretty much covers everything from small towns in the middle of nowhere to large metropolitan areas like NYC but excludes Yosemite, most of Alaska, etc -- you know, the places where almost no one lives and probably don't even have cell reception. UAs and UCs combined, according to US Census data from 2010, cover 1,565,052.983 km^2. If we pretend that ISPs weren't planning on wiring up rural areas with fiber anyways, that means we spent $127,791 per square kilometer and got nothing for it. (For the record, the average population density of UAs and UCs together is 978.54/km^2). This would cover 80.7% of the total US population.

Per square kilometer of populated area, we spent over twelve times what South Korea did to get fiber to the home and got, basically, nothing for it.