[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lots-of-people-in-citie...
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).
Ah so the internet is good in theory, it's only in practice that internet connectivity is poor.
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....
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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%).