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I think you're just making my point for me. The telco companies have made several times that in the past 10 years. There is simply not enough reinvested into th

• ryanmercer 7y ago
  Yes they've made profits, but as it stands now I can get in my car and drive 5 minutes and not be able to get AT&T Uverse but I"ll be able to get Comcast where at home I can get Uverse AND Comcast but can't get Spectrum. To go into a market, an ISP has to be able to reasonably recover their roll-out costs from that market. If they spend xxx dollars rolling out to a town, and then if they can hope to sell service to 75% of the homes, but are only going to make 0.5x or even xx of that back each year as profit, is it reasonable for them to spend xxx amount just to deploy when it might be a decade or more before they recover their initial investment? And what about the (likely) x to xx a year to maintain the equipment from squirrels/birds/storms/drunk drivers, and then upgrading the technology etc. It's great when you have a small country, that you can drive across in a day, but when you're talking about 1/3 of a continent everything is orders of magnitude more expensive and more difficult. I think people easily fall into the "well that country has it!" but they don't realize that "that" country is tiny. Let's take the country with the fastest internet [1], Taiwan, with an average speed of 85.02Mbps - it is 13,974 square miles, that's 0.44% (zero point four four) of the contiguous United States. 41 states are larger than Taiwan. [1] https://www.swedishnomad.com/fastest-internet-in-the-world/ https://www.swedishnomad.com/fastest-internet-in-the-world/