>Always found it amazing how the US is so far ahead on tech yet is so terrible at actual internet penetration.

I'm in the US and I've had fiber since '01. Not all places are equal in the US when it comes to internet penetration.

The US is BIG, with a lot of rural areas.

If you read the article, Fort Collins had to issue $143 million in bonds to finance the system. The US is enormous, and the cost to deliver fiber to everyone will be high (versus Europe or South Korea).

Arguably, as a muni utility, you don’t care about turning a profit versus Comcast and other for profit enterprises. And you have local governance over the infra and how it’s operated through local government. But it still takes a lot of effort; effort that can be distributed across the country, but effort that needs to be expended nevertheless.

The United States bay be big, but it still has double the population density of New Zealand and yet New Zealand has high avaliability of cheap gigabit fibre.

That’s hardly a fair comparison when 1/3 of the population of NZ lives in Auckland.

Does every single place and person in NZ have super fast internet? NZ and Australia both have a huge portion of their populations in their major cities or around them. It is not at all the same as comparing to the US’s population density.

How about the densest place in continental US? NY Manhattan, 1st Avenue - choice is Verizon DSL or Spectrum Business Cable.

"New York Votes to Kick Spectrum Cable Out of the State" https://fortune.com/2018/07/29/spectrum-communications-kicke...

"New York City sues Verizon for not completing citywide fiber network" https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/14/nyc-sues-verizon/

Yes, many rural areas in New Zealand have super fast internet. The same can not be said for Australia.

>The US is enormous (versus Europe ...).

Europe is bigger by area actually, but yes I hear you on the practicality front.

We can argue reasons all day long - point is US consumer internet seems pretty terrible from an outsider perspective, esp when considering the US's overall tech role.

Good thing 80% of the population is concentrated into cities and not spread across the country...