That explains why you can't get decent service in rural Montana, but not in San Francisco! The best fiber services around (other than Google) tends to be the municipal ones that don't give one of the big operators space to pull their bullshit though.

Yeah totally, it's not a perfect comparator, but given that the rest of Western Europe is much, much denser I thought that it was important to note.

The crummy service in cities apparently is due to regulatory capture, while the good EU service is again down to regulation, but in a much better way.