Technology

If Netherlands was a US state it would be ranked 42/50 in area. We have zero-population zones larger than your whole country. Our government refused to spend taxpayer money properly on telecom infrastructure since the 1990s so some of us are stuck here with Pony Express internet, it’s awful.

Oh and now our corrupt gov wants to eliminate “wasteful” fiber in exchange for Musk becoming a trillionaire with Starlink. Lovely.

You’re comparing very different sizes geographically. This chart seems to indicate that around 2015 there were about 1.6 billion miles or 2.5 billion kilometers of telephone wire deployed across the US. Running fiber or coax across the same distances is costly. Electricity and telephone service reached just about every house in the 1930s because the government paid for it as part of Depression-era spending, then declared that these items were necessary utilities that must be provided to new homes and businesses constructed later. A lot of the telecom companies were hoping to get the government to do that again. There have been some bills providing government money for these, but the telecom companies have been trying to take the money but do the bare minimum or only roll out wireless service, and the government has been slow providing funding. Meanwhile SpaceX has been trying to say they should get the money instead because they can get everyone online faster and their low orbit constellation doesn’t have the latency issues of the satellite internet traditionally available to rural customers. I think they cancelled the money that had been awarded and gave it to SpaceX back when Musk was running the government this spring. And of course, none of the companies want the Internet classified as a utility because then they have to provide equal access to everything instead of trying to slow access to Netflix unless Netflix pays them.