Agreed. Whenever there's a comparison of our pathetic speeds with those in Korea/Japan, people claim "the US is a huge country", etc. However, San Francisco's density (6600/km^2) is higher than that of Tokyo (6000/km^2); why doesn't SF have FTTH?
Comparisons to Tokyo are not necessarily instructive, since Tōkyō-to includes a vast swathe of essentially uninhabited mountains. Population density in the central 23 wards, which is what people usually mean when they say "Tokyo", is 14,485/km2.
Where is the majority of Japanese internet traffic going? Where is the majority of San Fransiscan internet traffic going?
There's more than just population density to take into account. It makes a big difference when you don't need nearly as much long haul backbone capacity because almost all of the destinations for the traffic are close to the subscribers.
No, not really. The US has had a massive amount of backhaul fiber, huge amounts of it stayed dark for years. That in turn dropped transit prices to almost nothing. Bandwidth at data centers and other places near transit hubs is very cheap. The U.S. problem is a last mile problem.
In my experience (just shopping around for high-bandwidth hosting, including looking at regional pricing of CDNs), backhaul is way cheaper in the US than anywhere else, including Europe and Asia.
