You need to build coverage for a huge portion of the population to get a license in many western countries. So all customers in the less densely populated count

You need to build coverage for a huge portion of the population to get a license in many western countries. So all customers in the less densely populated countries have share that cost. There is also strict requirements on uptime and huge fines for telcos in western countries if the service goes down, even for just a moment. Needless to say that creating a resilient network costs a lot more.