That's why I bring up the situation in the USA. In many respects (particularly regarding infrastructure-related technology roll-out), the US indeed lags behind others. You bring up internet speeds: this makes sense considering the immense cost of rolling out fiber-optic infrastructure vs. the sheer size of the US. Population density is much lower here than in Europe, so such massive projects are much slower to roll out. Telephone and water piping infrastructure is also quickly deteriorating in the US....
Sorry but population density makes no sense.
Take for example Romania which is one of the poorest in Europe, they have one large city and then nothing, low density, low wages yet you can still have 500Mbps for 10$. And they do have fiber optic cables even if they don;t have running water in some villages.
New York should have the highest speeds in the world because of density and purchasing power, yet....
As I said, it's something peculiar about Americans and their cash.
Even Chinese are far more open minded than you when it comes to electronic payments.
Maybe you are right. It was just based on my gut reaction (judging by the costs to roll out fiber optic nationwide). Here is what I am talking about:
United States population: 324,070,000 = 33 per km2
Israel population: 7,697,600 = 371 per km2
Netherlands population: 17,210,000 = 414 per km2
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_densityThe cost to deploy new fiber optic infrastructure to extremely dense EU countries is nothing compared to that of the sparsely-populated USA:
How outrageous? Well, a new report from Goldman Sachs that talks about the possibility of Google building out a cable system says it would cost over $140 billion to cover the whole country.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-it-would-cost-google-to-build-a-cable-network-2012-12The real problem is that the US government chooses not to invest into telecom infrastructure (and it continues to allow other aspects of vital infrastructure to crumble as well). Instead, it expects private industry to pay all the costs. So, what do private companies do? They continue milking customers for massive profits while rolling out quality broadband infrastructure at a snail's pace.
Maybe the real problem is the monopolistic position of companies like AT&T and Verizon. With more competition, there might be a greater push in the private sector to advance fiber optic roll-out. But regarding the deployment, due to population density, I am quite sure that the midwestern US will receive service improvements many years later than metro centers like New York City and Los Angeles.
