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> 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. |