I live in a metro area in the US and thousands of homes in my community do not have land-based broadband options. The US incumbents have totally failed and it isn't because there's a lot of desert in the West and Alaska. I'm sick of this argument which doesn't explain why city dwellers in most places in America have the worst internet in the developed world.

I live in the middle of nowhere USA. I'm about 1,000 feet off the road (that only random farms are on, about 20 miles from the small city we're near).

My local ISP trenched fiber to my house for free and provides gig internet for $80/month.

The funny thing is my previous house was in town and I had to settle for 100Mbit for the same price. ISPs are all sorts of messed up.

It’s all about what it costs to upgrade - if a rural ISP has to upgrade copper infrastructure for whatever reason they’ll fiber it.

In the city it’s often just as easy to let what is working continue “working” - a major rollout takes a lot of money.

Yep engineering the new network, pulling permits, hiring the contractor, buying new equipment/lines all cost $$$$$$

Yup, I live in San Francisco proper, and my only choice is Comcast cable. Looks like the current promo pricing for 1200Mbps is around $70/mo, but I can't quickly find what the normal price is. And I assume the uplink is something abysmal like 25Mbps.

(I'm on Comcast's Business service, $250/mo for 1000/35 [long dumb story why]. Most of the time I see under 600 down when checking on speed test sites, and real-world speeds downloading large files rarely exceeds 250. I expect real-world speeds on the non-business service are even worse.)

It's pretty embarrassing that this is the state of things.

Most of San Francisco can be served by Wave (cable). Sonic also has a large presence in San Francisco as well.

Over in Oakland I am paying $40/mo to Sonic for 10Gbps (though I only have equipment to route at 1Gbps at the moment)

I'm also in SF Bay Area and I just had 3 Gbps symmetric fiber installed by Comcast. This is their $299/mo "Gigabit Pro" option. I posted about it on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/comments/tkmv9y/upd...

There's a benchmark posted there showing that the speed is really as advertised.

I live in a not-very-metro area in the usa and get gigabit fiber for $65/mo.

I'm in Jersey City and have fios, 1gbit for $70 a month

Let's consider Gross National Product of each county adjusted for population size:

gnpUSD = {'USA': 21,650,000,000,000, 'THA': 491,910,000,000} #4th quarter 2021

pop = {'USA': 329,000,000, 'THA': 70,000,000} #as of 2021

gnp['USA'] // pop['USA'] 65805

gnp['THA'] // pop['THA'] 7027

Seems more like a distribution of resources issue... so why not jack up taxes on the wealthiest 1% and use it to pay for things like high-speed fiber in all the rural areas? Doubtless this would lead to economic growth?

It isn’t a ‘tax the 1%’ issue, it’s a corruption and market capture issue in the US that we refuse to acknowledge.

Throwing more money at it usually makes that kind of problem WORSE not better.

FDR's Rural Electricity Cooperatives did a lot to electrify much of the midwest and rural south, along with the creation of the TVA. I doubt anyone would want to rely on the current major providers, Comcast etc., who have such a bad track record, to accomplish this. Municipal broadband sounds like a better option:

> "The Rural Electrification Act of 1936, enacted on May 20, 1936, provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve isolated rural areas of the United States. The funding was channeled through cooperative electric power companies, hundreds of which still exist today. (wiki)"

There are fair few places in the US where the local power company also owns a fiber network and provides (relatively speaking) super cheap gigabit or multi-gigabit internet service

However there are just as many places where the state's government was bought off to ban such networks because the majors are afraid of actual competition.

Don’t forget the existing providers have already received massive funds to ‘improve rural broadband’ in the same vein as that act. Hundred of billions of dollars if I remember correctly.

It’s mostly been ineffective.

I know. It's several factors, density, history of infra of telecom companies etc.

Sheer size isn't what you should compare. Population density is much more relevant. Granted, Thailand still comes out ahead, but by far less than your size comparison (33.6/km^2 vs 132/km^2)