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Sweden had 98,5% xDSL coverage in 2011 and aims for 90% coverage of 100 Mbps service by 2020.

People still live in the countryside. Rural areas aren't some uninhabited wilderness.

If your aim is to provide broadband to all, you'll have to build there too. Sweden aims to do 100 Mbps to 90% of the population by 2020. Can't do that by just covering urban areas.

> If you compare paved roads only, the U.S. and Sweden have the same linear density

That's a fair point.

> And even then, it's much less expensive to connect two dense urban areas at either end of a 100 mile road than to serve sparse suburbs and exurbs along a 100 mile stretch of road.

Not necessarily. Build costs in dense urban areas are high, but there are more subscribers. Suburbs and exurbs are cheaper to build per mile, but have less customers. It averages out fairly well.

They might pay, if they got to chose their provider freely like they can in Sweden, where they build open access networks where any ISP can provide service.

That's an interesting observation. I wonder if that 99.6% figure is a mistake or if they use a different coverage definition for wireless, because the numbers don't add up.

Looking at the map, the northernmost county has barely any HSPA coverage. Nevertheless that county has a population of a quarter of a million inhabitants. To get 99.6% coverage, you'd still have to cover over 200 000 of those and everybody else in the country. That's clearly impossible as 100 000 inhabitants in that county live outside the ten largest "metro" areas.

There's just no way of not covering a lot of roads if if you aim for coverage in the high nineties with such a dispersed population.