Looking at population density alone is misleading; what you really want is population-weighted population density (i.e. how dense are the places where people live). Sweden has large sparsely-populated areas, but almost the whole population is clustered in a handful of major cities. The Stockholm metro area has a quarter of the entire country's population. If the U.S. population were distributed the same way, the D.C. metro area would have 80 million people over an area including Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware. (Instead, it has only 6 million people and the vast majority of those states are rural).

In any event, the U.S.'s proportion of higher-speed connections compares pretty well to Sweden. According to Akamai, in Q4 2016 the U.S. at 42% of connections above 15 mbps. That's less than Sweden (49%) but comparable to Finland (44%). It's way higher than Germany (30%).

Even many dense urban areas in the U.S. have quite low broadband penetration, so it can't be chalked up entirely to low-density areas like small towns and rural areas. According to Fivethirtyeight [1], only 28% of adults within the D.C. city limits have home internet faster than dialup. And Manhattan, pretty much the most urbanized locale in the country, is only a bit higher, at 36%. Many low-density exurban areas are actually higher than that, so something other than density is responsible.

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lots-of-people-in-citie...

That's comparing apples and oranges. American metro areas are shaped very differently than European ones. Only 10% of people in the D.C. metro area live within city limits, versus 40% of people in Stockholm's metro area. That inner city population skews much poorer than the metro area as a whole, with a quarter of households making under $25,000 annually. That notwithstanding the city itself is very well wired. If you live in Anacostia (one of the poorest neighborhoods) you can choose from two gigabit fiber providers and two gigabit cable providers.

And as far as I can tell the difference in uptake is not really because broadband is cheaper in Stockholm Internet. Telia charges 990 SEK ($122) for gigabit. Comcast charges $150 for 2 gig, while Verizon charges $70-100 for 1 gig. At the low end, Telia charges $50 for 100/100, versus $40 for Verizon's 50/50 plan.

DC also is a good example of what I mean about population-weighted density. The D.C. metro area has about the same density as the Stockholm metro area, and the municipalities have about the same density too. But in Stockholm 40% of people live in the denser core city versus only 10% of people in D.C. So even though the metro areas have the same density, the distribution makes DC harder to wire (all else being equal).

> That inner city population skews much poorer than the metro area as a whole, with a quarter of households making under $25,000 annually. That notwithstanding the city itself is very well wired. If you live in Anacostia (one of the poorest neighborhoods) you can choose from two gigabit fiber providers and two gigabit cable providers.

Ah so the internet is good in theory, it's only in practice that internet connectivity is poor.

No in practice the Internet is great (see the Akamai stats above). And at least for fiber the price is comparable (see my edit above). The US just has more income inequality, and segregated poor people into inner cities. While lamentable, that is an orthogonal issue that has nothing to do with broadband policy.

That still doesn't explain New York. The density and shape of New York is more like what you describe for European cities due to the fact that it was developed before the car was invented. So why does the internet connectivity suck in Manhattan?

> American metro areas are shaped very differently than European ones.

Oi.

So many excuses for why in so many large cities of the US you can struggle to find anything above 5mbps connections.

"Oh, the US has such a unique density, unlike anywhere else!" - well, actually ...

"Oh, well, the cities are shaped differently!"

Come on now.

> versus $40 for Verizon's 50/50 plan.

You mean with FIOS? That they are not selling any more because it wasn't profitable enough for them once they had had to build any notable infrastructure?

Oh, not to mention that that $40/mo 50/50 plan actually went up to as high as $99/mo after year one, depending on your area....

You're arguing from a false premise that excuses need to be made. As the data shows, US Internet, on average, is very competitive, no excuses needed. To use France as an example: According to OECD data, fiber deployment is higher in the US than in France (11% of broadband connections versus 8%). But if you want to know why they built fiber in Paris first then the surrounding communes, while in DC the suburbs got it before the city, well shape and demographics has a lot to do with it.

As to FIOS, they're not only still selling it, but upgrading the whole footprint to gigabit. And in much of the footprint (e.g. the D.C. suburbs), Comcast is offering multi-gig for $150/month. I don't know why my redneck neighborhood in exurban Maryland apparently has better internet choices than the Bay Area. Chalk that up to another major difference between the US and Europe: in the US, actual broadband construction is driven by state and local policy, not national policy.

Good broadband is no doubt still an issue in parts of Germany, especially if not cable is available. But I see a big political push and discussion on how to have higher standards and how to reach them. No one says "well then, lets make the status quo the standard".

I have to say that recently I sound much too arrogant concerning the US. Sorry to you guys. It is just that the little Texas landowner in me, that I am, wants to cry at night at the sum of this years politics. It has not been like that the governments before.

If there is a country that has a place in my heart, it is yours.

Here in Lithuania, most phone networks offer LTE for home internet, for rural areas where you can't get fibre. LTE covers 95% of the country by area (admittedly the geography is favourable as the country is rather flat). I can't find any real details on speeds, as it is sold 'as good as you can get', but one provider says with LTE where the theoretical maximum is 100 Mbps, you can get an average of 35 Mbps down and 10 Mbps up - however they are now rolling out LTE Advanced with a theoretical maximum of 300 Mbps.

Another comment expresses concerns about not being able to get the coverage advertised, but these are all just political issues. When you take a contract here they'll check the expected coverage and warn you if it could be bad, and even then you can cancel the contract within the first 30 days with no extra charges. And don't forget that LTE hardware designed for home use usually has more and better antennas than mobile devices, and you can install an external antenna.

N.b. The Akamai ratings for Lithuania don't look that great, but I'd assume it's mostly because people here often have older generation mobile devices (so not the fastest LTE) and computers (so no 5GHz wifi). There is also a bit of a resistance to upgrade, so a lot of people are on slower connections that they deem 'good enough' even though they could switch provider and get 10x the speed for the same price (a couple of years ago fibre was installed in my building so I could upgrade from 10 Mbps cable to 1000 Mbps fibre, but they didn't even put an advert on the noticeboard so I didn't realise for a few months).

D.C. - Boston has 52.33 million (15%) in a much smaller land area than your suggesting. Really once your talking about 2+ Million population centers adding some long distance fiber between them is so cheap it's practically free compared to last mile costs.

PS: Fairfax county a suburb of D.C. has a over 60% of the population (1.1m) than West Virginia (1.8m) in less than 2% of the land area aka 406mi² vs 24,038 mi² aka or well over 50 times the population density.

> dense are the places where people live). Sweden has large sparsely-populated areas, but almost the whole population is clustered in a handful of major cities. The Stockholm metro area has a quarter of the entire country's population

Obviously large cities in all countries will have high speed broadband. A better measure of broadband penetration is probably to look outside cities. Perhaps surprisingly, fiber is often built from "the outside in" in Sweden, due to subsidies. Dense areas such as cities obviously have a lot of choice, but after that the places that got (and keep getting) fiber are remote and very sparsely populated areas. The thinking (I'm assuming) is that medium density places such as suburbs will be getting fiber by market forces, and already have choices such as DSL in the meantime - so the vast subsidies to pull fiber to every remote cottage is focusing on the really remote areas such as small islands, small remote villages etc.

So contrary to what one might think, Sweden now has fiber in many of the lowest density areas such as remote houses in the Stockholm archipelago

I find those numbers highly suspect. In Portugal, 94% of the subscribers had a contracted speed of 20mbps or more. Now, contracted is not real, but only 28% above 15mbps? And dropping? That makes no sense.

America has always had terrible internet access, Congress long ago created monopolies for telephony and cable video and the legacy of those policies are still the problem today (two massive and completely different regulatory regimes and two industries that are totally politicized and the largest political donors).

Similarly Amtrak is a government monopoly disaster, there's no opportunity for private investment in U.S. passenger rail. Wikipedia says there are 1,500 private passenger rail companies in Germany. There are none here, outside of a handful of tourist experience lines. Our privately owned freight rail is, however, the finest in the world.

You seem to forget that the freight rail companies all used to do passenger rail and purposefully divested themselves of it.

Remember: at least the US were the first country to ever have internet at all :) So from whatever we profit now, USA invented it.

any country that pioneers a technology and implements the first generation of it will tend to lag as the second and third generations of that technology are developed.

Well, Switzerland (CERN) was the first place to have the world wide web...

Don't forget that Tim Berners-lee is British

And how does that get me better internet access?

Feels like we're not even trying to pretend like we're reaching for greatness. I am far less in love with the country then I once was; there is little audacity to reach for more as a country on many fronts (infrastructure, healthcare, education, general well being, connectivity).

That's the thing. We talk a big game, think technology can solve anything, but then when it comes down to basics, we say "Nah, too hard...too much space, etc etc".

Plus war.

So much endless mindless war...

Since 2001, America has spent an average of ~$300 billion dollars per year on the nebulous war in the Middle East.

Terrorists are media-hyped paper cuts compared to over 1 million Americans a year dying due to heart disease and cancer ($11B/y federal R&D) - not to mention Alzheimers, diabetes, obesity... and, to be blunt, you and almost everyone you know will probably die from one of those diseases.

For perspective: on average terrorism kills ~79 Americans per year (including 9/11). There are 121 American suicides per day.

The math doesn't make sense on any level. $300B/y killing people thousands of miles away and directly fueling increased hatred towards our nation... and a mere $11B/y invested in heard disease + cancer, which saves millions of citizen's at home.

Even pie-in-the-sky research like fusion is a better investment. Fusion would solve or mitigate large global problems, including terrorism, yet it receives a mere 1/1000th the funding level as our wars.

The real problem is we keep voting for the establishment parties because we believe that "3rd party will never win" dogma both parties roll out.

Remember this: Nobody won the 2016 popular vote.

40% of Americans didn't vote last year, 30% voted Trump, 30% voted Clinton - and many of those 30% were compromise voters that would have preferred a different primary candidate, or simply voted against the opponent's candidate.

This is democracy. If we want something different, we have to vote for someone different.

Yes... and starting a couple of days ago, the media has been really playing up the NK threat.. a real change -- in the past, Kim would make threats, and basically be ignored.. but now the same threats are front page news.

So of course we don't have money for any of those things... we need to save it for NK.

By your metric, nobody has won the popular vote in 2012, 2008, 2004, 2000, 96, 92, 88, 84, 80, etc. either.

That's right. We're chronic non-voters that are blind to the significance of that block.

To add a comparison to your point, in the last election in Sweden, 85.8% of the voting-age population voted.

A few key differences:

* Everyone is already registered to vote (through IRS equivalent records)

* It's always on a Sunday

* Everyone gets a letter home in advance telling them where to go to vote (60% usually do this), or how to mail-in vote.

* Identification is handled either through ID/drivers license, OR someone with a valid ID vouching for your identity.

* There are 8+ parties to vote from, and you get parliament representation if your newly created party gets 4% of votes.

Companies have lobbies, people typically don't. The FCC is speaking for the large ISP's that lobby politicians to do so.

i'm less in love with national greatness than i once was.

IMHO, a tolerable mediocrity across every field would be better than national greatness if that mediocrity were uniformly distributed across the country and its residents.

>One more little sign America is more and more retiring its leadership in the world, opening doors for other nations to be more developed?

What leadership (except in economy size and military)?

Other nations have been more developed in internet, infrastructure, healthcare, education, work culture, etc for decades.

For about 15-20 years, really, though I can see why it would feel longer.

I don't think that e.g. the nordic countries or Switzerland were worse than the US in 1960 or 1970.

Heck, parts of NY were like a developing world city back then, much less places in the South and co...

Which nations? The only country which would be even comparable to US in terms of connectivity, healthcare and education quality, UK is still lagging behind US in all these matters. Good luck trying to get decent LTE or even 3G in London, or a proper timely healthcare for anything relatively complicated.

Are the other nations which are ahead in US in these areas which I am missing?

>The only country which would be even comparable to US in terms of connectivity, healthcare and education quality, UK is still lagging behind US in all these matters.

I think you should travel more. Maybe try Switzerland or the nordic region?

In internet speeds for example, the US just made it in the top 10 this year: https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-cou...

And if you visit a place like Switzerland you'll wonder what kind of developing world nightmare is the US compared to their efficiency, cleanliness, infrastructure, government services, and lots of other things besides.

It's also a few places ahead of the US in per capita GDP. But then again, several countries are: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

Not also how Sweden, Norway, Switcherland and Denmark have higher per capita median income than the US (adjusted for purchasing parity etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income

(Apart from access to healthcare, UK is less developed in those areas than lots of countries)

> Good luck trying to get decent LTE or even 3G in London, or a proper timely healthcare for anything relatively complicated.

> The time to schedule an appointment has jumped 30% in 15 U.S. metropolitan areas from 18.5 days in 2014 amid a national doctor shortage fueled by aging baby boomers, population growth and millions of Americans with health insurance.

It's easy to shorten wait times for healthcare by removing/keeping millions of people from having coverage.

Or by removing the annual cap on the number of doctors that graduate and simultaneously relaxing the regulations and paperwork, that prevent doctor from operating independently instead forcing them to join large networks like PAMF. I talked to a couple of my doctors, both of them admitted they would like to have a private practice, but would get buried by the paperwork and accounting they will have to perform in addition to their actual job.

100Mbit? That was a decade ago. I now have 500Mbit, but my ISP can easily deliver 1Gbit if I feel the need.

He is talking about a national minimum, not the speed of any one client.