To use a concrete example, 500/200 fiber through Orange in France is about $63/month after the one-year promo period: https://boutique.orange.fr/internet/offres-fibre/jet. The closest FiOS plan is ~$80/month after the promo period for symmetric gigabit. So we're somewhat more expensive, for somewhat faster speeds. Affordability-wise, it's about the same, considering the much higher household income in the U.S.
But if you visited say Baltimore and Paris, you wouldn't realize that. "France has fiber and Maryland doesn't," you'd conclude. Population distribution in the two places is very different: most people in the U.S., especially the folks who can afford higher tiers of internet service, live outside the core cities. While Baltimore has crappy internet choices, most of Maryland lives outside Baltimore, and has fiber. Indeed, Maryland is in the top-5, just behind Sweden and way ahead of France in Akamai's tests.
Lets start with Germany.
Internet (60 Mbps or More, Unlimited Data, Cable/ADSL) 25.92 € or 30.59 usd
https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/country_result.jsp?cou...
United States
Internet (60 Mbps or More, Unlimited Data, Cable/ADSL) 56.60 $
Further in the US only 80% of households had a broadband connection at home or access to a smartphone with data.
In Germany its 98.
In summery the internet is almost twice as expensive in the US and lots of people don't even have access to it.
We could go through all the countries you listed and see if we could find even one where your assertion is correct but I feel like that would be a waste of my and your time because its not clear that being able to find even one nation in all of Europe worse than the US would prove that private competition has served the US well. It hasn't.
The whole report is here: https://www.akamai.com/fr/fr/multimedia/documents/state-of-t.... Other interesting statistics: 48% of American connections are above 15 mbps; in Germany its 33%. Maryland, which has almost exactly the same population density as Germany, is at 60%.
Imagine
scenario 1
3 users with gigabit 4 users have dialup 3 users have nothing
Scenario 2:
4 users with gigabit 6 users with nothing
Scenario 3: 10 users have 50 Mbps
In scenario 1 the average is 300 even though only 30% of people have real internet access and 70% either can barely send email or have nothing at all. Scenario 2 is even better at 400 even though most people have nothing.
Another way to look at it is that one person with gigabit is as good as numerically as 20 people with real internet or 100 people with basic internet.
While in general I agree that competition is great - I don't think that applies to the last mile (from the next PoP to the customer).
Sure. Lots of people do. Japan’s railroads, subways, and many highways, are private. Water utilities in France are mostly private, as are most of its highways. Almost all electrical systems in the US and Europe were privatized in the 1980s and 1990s.
Would public internet infrastructure have been better in the US? Our internet speeds in the US are faster than our big EU competitors: UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. That’s pretty much the only piece of infrastructure you can say that for. Our subways aren’t better. Our roads aren’t better. Our regional trains aren’t better. But our internet service is better.
It’s not a philosophical question, but an economic one. How do you ensure adequate spending on very expensive infrastructure. Japan does it for rail by making rail companies private and allowing them to use land grants to enter retail leasing markets. (Japanese railways own lots of the land around stations and are the landlord for the associated retail establishments.) Many European countries have the political discipline to ensure adequate funding for public infrastructure. Both models can work.
But we already know that in the US we don’t have the political discipline to properly fund infrastructure. Infrastructure gets attacked from the right, who don’t want to pay taxes. But it also from the left, who want to use infrastructure as leverage for social issues. For example, in Stockholm, the publicly owned (but completely privately funded) dark fiber utility took 16-17 years to cover 90% of the city. There was no mandate to build in historically disadvantaged neighborhoods or anything like that—build out was based on demand. That approach is completely illegal in most US cities.