The flip side of this is that there's a contingent of Europeans who look down their noses as Americans, while having basically no comprehension of how utterly ridiculous it is to do something like compare the United States to Switzerland on any metric.
As I see it people in the US believe that the whole of the country needs to be treated equally. If you live in rural Kentucky your internet speed has to be the same as someone who lives in NYC.
Pointing out that New York is the economic engine the US runs on and deserves to get priority makes everyone upset.
Nobody likes to hear that they are lower on the priority totem pole, however, everybody understands when new businesses go after the biggest markets first.
If somebody is going to be upset by investing first in the areas with the most people...then you really have to disregard their point of view.
I live in a rural suburb and have had one of those cell-phone-over-ethernet setups in my house to handle the poor signal. I understand.
I think you could not be more incorrect about this. The FCC does sponsor efforts to make sure that less developed areas are getting broadband. However, I would argue that this is similar to electrification programs a century ago, and is more about access than equality.
From my experience, Americans care very much about what speed and reliability is available within their neighborhood. They care very little about access outside of their neighborhood.
I thought the meme was that Americans were fiercely individualistic and that Europeans were outcome-egalitarians? Of course the picture is more nuanced than that, but I've never heard the reverse before.
There most certainly are a bunch of Europeans who act holier than thou. That's silly on their part. But you most certainly can compare the countries.
Their relative differences are factors in the comparison. The US also has smaller administrative units you can compare with other countries with appropriate caveats.
You're not getting this at all. They are incomparable at so many levels:
1. There is a vast difference in population density, total population size, and total land mass, as discussed up thread.
2. Switzerland has a homogenous culture that has been extant for several hundred of years at a minimum and you could make an argument for over a thousand years. The western half of the US wasn't settled by Europeans until 150 years ago.
3. The U.S. has had both massive immigration from abroad as well as massive internal migration for the last 200 years. Aside from a few cities in the north east and south, there is essentially nowhere near the level of cultural continuity in the US that exists in most European countries.
4. Aside from the shared language, the cultural differences between various regions of the US are akin to the differences between Western, Southern, and Eastern Europe. Do Hungary and Germany agree on most political issues? Do Sweden and Italy?
5. The US culture is dominated by a settler/pioneer mentality because, up until about 50 years ago, if things weren't great wherever you were, you just uprooted yourself and moved West to find new opportunities. Nobody has been able to do this in Europe at a comparable scale for 1000+ years.
6. Switzerland does not have anywhere near the level of racial heterogeneity that the U.S. has. Not only does the US have a huge, underprivileged ethnic group that is descended from slaves, we have obtained a new huge underprivileged ethnic group in the last 60 years.
[edit] 7. Almost forgot to add: most US infrastructure, especially on the West Coast, was built during the automobile era.
What do 2-6 have to do with the actual subject of telecommunications? I’m not even going to bother with the details of 2-6, I’m just curious what point in context you thought you were making.
Telecommunications are infrastructure, building out or changing infrastructure requires political will and collective coordination. It’s much, much harder to gather political will in a place as politically and culturally heterogeneous as the US.
