Yea, if you want to treat all the major metro areas as islands this is a comfy little world view to hold against the evil cable corps, however, American cities are still generally less dense than their Europe or Asian counterparts.<p>Problem is there are large swaths of the population that don&#x27;t live anywhere near these metro areas and the communities and economies they participate in are nowhere near as dense.<p>Take the upper mid-west for example: Chicago, Minneapolis and Detroit are relatively easy (cheap) to wire up, but what about all the 15,000 population towns in between? Or the other 25% of the population that don&#x27;t live in cities at all. In these places the options are most often between traditional 56k dialup, or satellite.<p>As everyone else in this thread is saying, the last mile is where the real costs are at, and in America we suffer from both the physical reality of being less dense and the political paralysis that allows organizations like Comcast to flourish.  Even if we did fix the political problem, physics is still a bitch.