I’m shocked by how expensive mobile internet is in the US. I’m with giffgaff here in the UK, and I pay £10/month for 250 calling minutes, unlimited SMS and unlimited internet (no fair use policy).
Population density of Germany is 229 persons per km/sq. In the US it's 32. It's a lot more expensive to run the infrastructure for a country 27 times the geographic area and 1/7th the density.
Then explain why there's no EU-comparable regional service in areas of the US with far greater density, like any of the top ten metro areas. Even the cell carriers have large roaming-only gaps and dead zones, not just in the unpopulated western US, but on major freeways in California.
Using national population density to explain the extraordinary relative suckage of US broadband is a straw man argument.
There are some regional carriers but they're not necessarily well known. Not to mention that at&t, among others, have spent crap-loads of money lobbying to make it more difficult for smaller companies to get spectrum.
>Then explain why there's no EU-comparable regional service in areas of the US with far greater density
Because nobody wants regional service? There used to be regional service that was cheaper--I remember my parents signed up for it when they first got cellphones, around 2003--but it lost out in the marketplace, because people would cross a state line and be shocked by the roaming fees.
There are a lot of regional carriers left. I believe MetroPCS, the carrier in the article, may be one of them, since I'd never heard of the firm.
Edit: http://www.metropcs.com/coverage/ Their coverage maps indicate real coverage of a few metro areas, and roaming onto national networks.
It's just that regional carriers aren't a whole hell of a lot cheaper than the big national guys. Who wants a 10% discount for 1/100th the coverage area ?
I agree that the empty space in the western US distorts the population density, so just claiming sparse densities doesn't answer the question well. But isn't it obvious that there is are far fewer regional services in the US because Americans travel within the US more the Europeans travel within Europe? Lots more of the smartphone-carrying population travels from New York to California than from Spain to Poland.
Honestly, do you have any ideas about what causes these high prices other than density? The competition among the providers is pretty healthy, as far as I can tell.
Finland has a population density of 17/km^2. From a campaign, I can right now get unrestricted data at 384kbps for 3€/month, or "as much as the connection can handle", up to 14,4Mbps, typically 4Mbps, for 14€/month.
Lower population density actually helps wireless internet -- the cost is mainly not about the transmission equipment, it's about the very limited amount of total over-air bandwidth.
Lower population density actually helps wireless internet
Not quite true. Wireless internet is most cost effective when population density is at an extreme on the scale. If the density is low then you can use fewer towers that have larger cells and if the density is high then you need more capital for the higher-capacity infrastructure, but your backhauls are shorter and you have a larger userbase to recoup the investment. I would bet that for wireless operators in Finland the Helsinki area, Turku, and low-population areas make money while Kuopio is probably a break-even region at best...
The population distribution in Finland is nearly all in the lower 1/3 of the country though. Population distribution in the US is (I'm guessing) more normalized. So really you're talking about the population density of the Helsinki metro area, which is likely pretty high.
That still does not explain why I'm losing signal in the middle of Queens, for example. You can be damn sure, that nothing similar happened in the middle of Munich.
