In many of those countries people live in big and tall apartment buildings, so dropping an expensive fiber to just one block of those gives you TONS of users. C

In many of those countries people live in big and tall apartment buildings, so dropping an expensive fiber to just one block of those gives you TONS of users. Compare that to a typical rural suburbs in US, where you have to put down miles and miles of cable just to cover a big subdivision of standalone houses. Besides, raw download speed is not that important IMO. Well, perhaps for video. I wish browsers could download more than two files at the same time. I believe this limitation is pretty much obsolete these days.