There are HUGE, VAST swathes of the US with zero coverage whatsoever - there's literally 2 million square miles with no population or coverage - that's nearly 58% of the lower 48. So that'd reduce your ratio to 13 times. Then you figure that the US population is 4 times that of Germany, so saying that it's 26 times more painful for a US carrier to tower the US than a German is entirely inaccurate.