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I often see people commenting on the poor quality of America’s internet compared to European countries, but how much of that is due to the physical size of Amer

I often see people commenting on the poor quality of America’s internet compared to European countries, but how much of that is due to the physical size of America? I imagine it’s much more difficult to build out a larger network especially when many parts of America are not very populated.

hokumguru 5y ago
Looking at the countries above the USA... They all mostly have one thing in common, their populace lives almost entirely within a few primary concentrated areas. It is much easier to build out the infrastructure to only support a handful of major cities which certainly helps raise the average. edit: I want to make it clear that I think the fact that I can get gigabit internet in a town of 300k smack in the center of "flyover country" is absolutely amazing. I think that the USA competes with these other countries despite the size disadvantage is nothing short of astounding.
- cjbenedikt 5y ago
  I live in Baltimore - could certainly be considered a city - internet speed is appalling even with "business service".
- trothamel 5y ago
  The top 3 - Singapore, Hong Kong (SAR), and Monaco - are smaller than Rhode Island, the smallest state - even when you add them together.
  - wyager 5y ago
    My gigabit internet in HK was similarly priced to my gigabit internet in suburban USA (like US$80/mo). That said, in HK areas with robust competition between ISPs, some of the offerings were shockingly cheap. A friend of mine got 10Gbps for less than US$100/mo after negotiating. I don’t remember if HK lines were symmetric or not - my US line certainly isn’t.
    - vel0city 5y ago
      Note that symmetrical gigabit connections in the US are sometimes available. Its highly dependent on the type of network deployed. If its a PON deployment there's a good chance you're going to get a symmetrical connection (AT&T, Verizon, Frontier Fiber). If you have a coax connection (Spectrum, Comcast, Cox), there's little chance its symmetrical. For example, at my home on a residential PON connection a recent speedtest today showed ~990Mbit down, ~978Mbit up. At my office's new business coax connection just a few miles away, I usually get ~980Mbit down, 30Mbit up.
  - DamnYuppie 5y ago
    LOL they are smaller than the Dallas/Ft. Worth area alone!
- radicaldreamer 5y ago
  Yup, but I wonder why there were bandwidth issues in Europe when the pandemic first started (video streaming services started throttling bitrate very aggressively in Europe) but there were no issues in the United States. Perhaps the last mile average is slow but the overall infrastructure and backbone is more robust in the US (this would make sense historically as well)
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Wireless internet is more common in European and Asian countries because you can put up a few towers and be done, it gets throttled when you have congestion. America has fiber and mostly copper (from our phone line laying days) strung all throughout America, the bandwidth is much higher in total. The job left here is replacing copper w/ fiber (or at least DOCSIS 3.1 via copper), but it's expensive and some ISPs it isn't worth it for the customers they have, so you have some areas bringing the national average down. Starlink will be nice for really remote areas where it make no sense to run a line or a tower for a couple customers. Existing sat internet is unusable. There's also been a big push to modernize slightly bigger towns with fiber by smaller ISPs.
  - Bayart 5y ago
    As far as I can remember, the stress was mostly put on exchanges more so than overall capacity. I'm not aware of any real degradation beyond the panic in the news about « running out of Internet ».
  - hocuspocus 5y ago
    There was no issue in Europe either, it was a political decision, not a technical one.
- jack_jennings 5y ago
  While density may be part of it, my (admittedly: anecdotal) experience in splitting my time between Los Angeles and the nearby mountain communities over the last year is that LA broadband speed is consistently 5 times slower.
- setpatchaddress 5y ago
  This is the usual argument against doing large infrastructure in the USA, and I think it’s kind of missing the point: the USA also has much larger financial and physical resources than those countries. We also have counterarguments: we have a universal electrical network. We built a large railroad network across the entire country. We have an interstate highway system reaching every continental state (and with “interstates” in Alaska and Hawaii as well, if I’m not mistaken). Also, universal telephone service. I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I can’t get cell reception at my house. I have basic broadband, but I can’t get fiber despite being on a street where other houses have it. I would be very interested in a comparison of what the citizens of each country have paid to fund internet service. US taxpayers have given the telecom mono/duopolies a ton of free money and right-of-way and the providers have broken every promise to provide universal service in exchange.
  - hunterb123 5y ago
    Railroads, highways, and power/cable lines all go hand in hand. It's an amazing network and they were all built a long time ago with little improvement. The problem is shoveling money to other "universal" slush funds while ignoring actual infrastructure for decades. ISPs should have been a utility and they should treat it like Texas treats its grid. Have a company that manages the actual lines, and have multiple providers that can compete and sell data on it.
    - arbitrage 5y ago
      > they should treat it like Texas treats its grid like garbage that falls apart when people actually need to use it? or like a regressive money funnel to line the pockets of an oligarchical captured regulatory body? texas' power grid is not a goal any serious advocate can advance as doing anything right.
      - hunterb123 5y ago
        If you're referring to the 100 year winter freeze, yes maybe it should have been winterized, and they are now, but that's not what I'm talking about. Maybe all California homes should have A/C for these heat waves. Sometimes it doesn't make sense economically. I'm talking about having a transmission provider and having ISPs compete on the same lines. It keeps prices down (unless you tricked into buying variable wholesale via startups like Griddy) and it keeps lines in good shape.
- mbesto 5y ago
  Now take those same countries and look at GDP, number of publicly traded software companies, and capital investment provided by governments. There is some valid critique about how poor the USA is in terms of bandwidth. Not to mention cultural appropriation by most Americans of "being the best" at everything. Thus there's a reason (maybe not 100% valid) why people complain the USA isn't #1 on this list.
smoldesu 5y ago
I live in a semi-rural area, on a dirt road off the highway with 15-20 other neighbors on our half-mile stretch of street. Until Starlink hit, the best internet we could get was 500kbps unmetered, and maybe 4mbps metered if you were lucky. It was genuinely that bad.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  I think you're highlighting the huge challenge of American broadband. Every dirt road off every highway that has a dozen or two homes needs broadband -- that is an immense amount of infrastructure that's needed.
  - vidanay 5y ago
    Do they have electricity? I'm betting "yes". This means there are either above ground poles that fiber can be hung from, or if it was constructed in the last 30 years, the ground was opened for trenching, and a fiber should have been buried along side the power (wou'da, cou'da, shou'da). Dig once policies and pole sharing policies have been fought tooth and nail by the entrenched utilities.
Bayart 5y ago
While it's a point that intuitively makes sense, I'm not too sure of its true relevance. The US is just too rich for size to be an excuse. At least it can't be the only reason. It may be anecdotal, but all the complaints I've ever seen about broadband/fibre in the US have been in relation to local monopolies and the general fragmentation of the nation-wide network. In most EU countries, we have laws that force network owners to mutualise (they have to allow third parties to deploy the "last mile" so that people can pick any ISP within three months of a new local). Infrastructure and commercial operations are legally separate. I think the US would benefit from something like this on a federal level, at the risk of being called communism.
- comeonseriously 5y ago
  > The US is just too rich for size to be an excuse. We have access to cable internet and shortly fiber (from Metronet). We have some friends in an established (and not poor mind you) neighborhood not 2 miles away that doesn't even have cable run. They can't get ANY internet if it's not wireless. It baffles my mind.
- sumtechguy 5y ago
  I think the issue is that the problem is being generalized into a 'one size fits all' sort of problem. When the issue is a bunch of items. Rural is an issue. But so is duopolies. So is poor competition. In the year 2000 I could pick from 20-30 different ISPs. Now I can pick from basically 3. Woe unto you if those 3 decide it is going to cost you 20k just to do a hook up or just say 'not available' even though all of your neighbors have it.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    That's because the government forced Bell/AT&T phone lines to be leasable by other companies. Cable and fiber lines are _not_ required to have that kind of competition, which is why Comcast often delivers the only high-speed connection in a suburban area and can price gouge you.
    - 5y ago
ggggtez 5y ago
I can attest you can find bad internet in small cities just the same as in rural places. Sure, size is a factor, but it's not the only factor, nor is it the main factor. The main problem is monopolies.
jeffbee 5y ago
The thing about rural America is nobody lives there. More than 80% of Americans live in urbanized areas, the same fraction as France, Norway, Spain, and the world generally. The reason America doesn't have broadband or trains is not because of its extent, it's because our war budget is $2000 per capita per year.
- vel0city 5y ago
  "Urban" in the US can still be quite different from "urban" of Europe or other places around the world. I live in a really close suburb of one of the biggest cities in the US. I technically live in an "urban" area, and places further out from the actual city that are less dense are still considered "urban". The population density here is ~4,000 people/mi^2. A similar comparison to Paris location-wise would be something like Le Blanc-Mesnil, which has a density of 18,000 people/mi^2. Both of these are considered "urban", but they are extremely different kinds of cities density-wise.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    "Our urbanized places are garbage" is a completely different statement from "our country is large". One of them is circumstance and the other is self-inflicted.
    - vel0city 5y ago
      Whether or not "our urbanized places are garbage" is very much subjective. I don't consider the place I live to be garbage, personally I prefer it to living in a place as dense as Paris. Whether you think US "urban" areas are garbage or not, your statement doesn't change the fact that "urban" in the US versus "urban" elsewhere can be pretty radically different. Saying "more than 80% of Americans live in urbanized areas, the same fraction as France, Norway, Spain, and the world generally" is kind of comparing apples and oranges. Yeah sure 80% of the population lives in locations labeled "urban", but the average densities of those urban areas in Europe are much more dense than the US. I'd imagine there are plenty of places in the US classified as "urban" which would easily compare to the densities of "rural" areas in Europe. I do agree with the idea that a partial part of the problem is a lack of focus on infrastructure spending compared to other budgets such as the military. Hopefully that will change soon.
ortusdux 5y ago
I would like to see some metrics that take into consideration landmass, population distribution, grid scale, or the like. Singapore's road network is roughly 3500km vs the United State's 6,850,000km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_network_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
0xcde4c3db 5y ago
As far as I can tell it's not that America as a whole has bad internet, it's that we mostly put modern cable/conduit/equipment in neighborhoods that are either new or rich. There are places where brand new fiber and rusting DSL are separated by 100 feet.

hokumguru 5y ago

Looking at the countries above the USA... They all mostly have one thing in common, their populace lives almost entirely within a few primary concentrated areas. It is much easier to build out the infrastructure to only support a handful of major cities which certainly helps raise the average. edit: I want to make it clear that I think the fact that I can get gigabit internet in a town of 300k smack in the center of "flyover country" is absolutely amazing. I think that the USA competes with these other countries despite the size disadvantage is nothing short of astounding.

cjbenedikt 5y ago
I live in Baltimore - could certainly be considered a city - internet speed is appalling even with "business service".
trothamel 5y ago
The top 3 - Singapore, Hong Kong (SAR), and Monaco - are smaller than Rhode Island, the smallest state - even when you add them together.
- wyager 5y ago
  My gigabit internet in HK was similarly priced to my gigabit internet in suburban USA (like US$80/mo). That said, in HK areas with robust competition between ISPs, some of the offerings were shockingly cheap. A friend of mine got 10Gbps for less than US$100/mo after negotiating. I don’t remember if HK lines were symmetric or not - my US line certainly isn’t.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    Note that symmetrical gigabit connections in the US are sometimes available. Its highly dependent on the type of network deployed. If its a PON deployment there's a good chance you're going to get a symmetrical connection (AT&T, Verizon, Frontier Fiber). If you have a coax connection (Spectrum, Comcast, Cox), there's little chance its symmetrical. For example, at my home on a residential PON connection a recent speedtest today showed ~990Mbit down, ~978Mbit up. At my office's new business coax connection just a few miles away, I usually get ~980Mbit down, 30Mbit up.
- DamnYuppie 5y ago
  LOL they are smaller than the Dallas/Ft. Worth area alone!
radicaldreamer 5y ago
Yup, but I wonder why there were bandwidth issues in Europe when the pandemic first started (video streaming services started throttling bitrate very aggressively in Europe) but there were no issues in the United States. Perhaps the last mile average is slow but the overall infrastructure and backbone is more robust in the US (this would make sense historically as well)
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Wireless internet is more common in European and Asian countries because you can put up a few towers and be done, it gets throttled when you have congestion. America has fiber and mostly copper (from our phone line laying days) strung all throughout America, the bandwidth is much higher in total. The job left here is replacing copper w/ fiber (or at least DOCSIS 3.1 via copper), but it's expensive and some ISPs it isn't worth it for the customers they have, so you have some areas bringing the national average down. Starlink will be nice for really remote areas where it make no sense to run a line or a tower for a couple customers. Existing sat internet is unusable. There's also been a big push to modernize slightly bigger towns with fiber by smaller ISPs.
- Bayart 5y ago
  As far as I can remember, the stress was mostly put on exchanges more so than overall capacity. I'm not aware of any real degradation beyond the panic in the news about « running out of Internet ».
- hocuspocus 5y ago
  There was no issue in Europe either, it was a political decision, not a technical one.
jack_jennings 5y ago
While density may be part of it, my (admittedly: anecdotal) experience in splitting my time between Los Angeles and the nearby mountain communities over the last year is that LA broadband speed is consistently 5 times slower.
setpatchaddress 5y ago
This is the usual argument against doing large infrastructure in the USA, and I think it’s kind of missing the point: the USA also has much larger financial and physical resources than those countries. We also have counterarguments: we have a universal electrical network. We built a large railroad network across the entire country. We have an interstate highway system reaching every continental state (and with “interstates” in Alaska and Hawaii as well, if I’m not mistaken). Also, universal telephone service. I live in the heart of Silicon Valley, and I can’t get cell reception at my house. I have basic broadband, but I can’t get fiber despite being on a street where other houses have it. I would be very interested in a comparison of what the citizens of each country have paid to fund internet service. US taxpayers have given the telecom mono/duopolies a ton of free money and right-of-way and the providers have broken every promise to provide universal service in exchange.
- hunterb123 5y ago
  Railroads, highways, and power/cable lines all go hand in hand. It's an amazing network and they were all built a long time ago with little improvement. The problem is shoveling money to other "universal" slush funds while ignoring actual infrastructure for decades. ISPs should have been a utility and they should treat it like Texas treats its grid. Have a company that manages the actual lines, and have multiple providers that can compete and sell data on it.
  - arbitrage 5y ago
    > they should treat it like Texas treats its grid like garbage that falls apart when people actually need to use it? or like a regressive money funnel to line the pockets of an oligarchical captured regulatory body? texas' power grid is not a goal any serious advocate can advance as doing anything right.
    - hunterb123 5y ago
      If you're referring to the 100 year winter freeze, yes maybe it should have been winterized, and they are now, but that's not what I'm talking about. Maybe all California homes should have A/C for these heat waves. Sometimes it doesn't make sense economically. I'm talking about having a transmission provider and having ISPs compete on the same lines. It keeps prices down (unless you tricked into buying variable wholesale via startups like Griddy) and it keeps lines in good shape.
mbesto 5y ago
Now take those same countries and look at GDP, number of publicly traded software companies, and capital investment provided by governments. There is some valid critique about how poor the USA is in terms of bandwidth. Not to mention cultural appropriation by most Americans of "being the best" at everything. Thus there's a reason (maybe not 100% valid) why people complain the USA isn't #1 on this list.

smoldesu 5y ago

I live in a semi-rural area, on a dirt road off the highway with 15-20 other neighbors on our half-mile stretch of street. Until Starlink hit, the best internet we could get was 500kbps unmetered, and maybe 4mbps metered if you were lucky. It was genuinely that bad.

thehappypm 5y ago
I think you're highlighting the huge challenge of American broadband. Every dirt road off every highway that has a dozen or two homes needs broadband -- that is an immense amount of infrastructure that's needed.
- vidanay 5y ago
  Do they have electricity? I'm betting "yes". This means there are either above ground poles that fiber can be hung from, or if it was constructed in the last 30 years, the ground was opened for trenching, and a fiber should have been buried along side the power (wou'da, cou'da, shou'da). Dig once policies and pole sharing policies have been fought tooth and nail by the entrenched utilities.

Bayart 5y ago

While it's a point that intuitively makes sense, I'm not too sure of its true relevance. The US is just too rich for size to be an excuse. At least it can't be the only reason. It may be anecdotal, but all the complaints I've ever seen about broadband/fibre in the US have been in relation to local monopolies and the general fragmentation of the nation-wide network. In most EU countries, we have laws that force network owners to mutualise (they have to allow third parties to deploy the "last mile" so that people can pick any ISP within three months of a new local). Infrastructure and commercial operations are legally separate. I think the US would benefit from something like this on a federal level, at the risk of being called communism.

comeonseriously 5y ago
> The US is just too rich for size to be an excuse. We have access to cable internet and shortly fiber (from Metronet). We have some friends in an established (and not poor mind you) neighborhood not 2 miles away that doesn't even have cable run. They can't get ANY internet if it's not wireless. It baffles my mind.
sumtechguy 5y ago
I think the issue is that the problem is being generalized into a 'one size fits all' sort of problem. When the issue is a bunch of items. Rural is an issue. But so is duopolies. So is poor competition. In the year 2000 I could pick from 20-30 different ISPs. Now I can pick from basically 3. Woe unto you if those 3 decide it is going to cost you 20k just to do a hook up or just say 'not available' even though all of your neighbors have it.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  That's because the government forced Bell/AT&T phone lines to be leasable by other companies. Cable and fiber lines are _not_ required to have that kind of competition, which is why Comcast often delivers the only high-speed connection in a suburban area and can price gouge you.
  - 5y ago

ggggtez 5y ago

I can attest you can find bad internet in small cities just the same as in rural places. Sure, size is a factor, but it's not the only factor, nor is it the main factor. The main problem is monopolies.

jeffbee 5y ago

The thing about rural America is nobody lives there. More than 80% of Americans live in urbanized areas, the same fraction as France, Norway, Spain, and the world generally. The reason America doesn't have broadband or trains is not because of its extent, it's because our war budget is $2000 per capita per year.

vel0city 5y ago
"Urban" in the US can still be quite different from "urban" of Europe or other places around the world. I live in a really close suburb of one of the biggest cities in the US. I technically live in an "urban" area, and places further out from the actual city that are less dense are still considered "urban". The population density here is ~4,000 people/mi^2. A similar comparison to Paris location-wise would be something like Le Blanc-Mesnil, which has a density of 18,000 people/mi^2. Both of these are considered "urban", but they are extremely different kinds of cities density-wise.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  "Our urbanized places are garbage" is a completely different statement from "our country is large". One of them is circumstance and the other is self-inflicted.
  - vel0city 5y ago
    Whether or not "our urbanized places are garbage" is very much subjective. I don't consider the place I live to be garbage, personally I prefer it to living in a place as dense as Paris. Whether you think US "urban" areas are garbage or not, your statement doesn't change the fact that "urban" in the US versus "urban" elsewhere can be pretty radically different. Saying "more than 80% of Americans live in urbanized areas, the same fraction as France, Norway, Spain, and the world generally" is kind of comparing apples and oranges. Yeah sure 80% of the population lives in locations labeled "urban", but the average densities of those urban areas in Europe are much more dense than the US. I'd imagine there are plenty of places in the US classified as "urban" which would easily compare to the densities of "rural" areas in Europe. I do agree with the idea that a partial part of the problem is a lack of focus on infrastructure spending compared to other budgets such as the military. Hopefully that will change soon.

ortusdux 5y ago

I would like to see some metrics that take into consideration landmass, population distribution, grid scale, or the like. Singapore's road network is roughly 3500km vs the United State's 6,850,000km. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_network_size https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_road_netw...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

0xcde4c3db 5y ago

As far as I can tell it's not that America as a whole has bad internet, it's that we mostly put modern cable/conduit/equipment in neighborhoods that are either new or rich. There are places where brand new fiber and rusting DSL are separated by 100 feet.