The Left, who loves to scold the rest of us about ‘sustainability’ cannot understand how commercial projects must have sustainable economics. That means the value of their services must exceed on average the cost of providing them. The private telecom infrastructure in the US is sustainable. A project in some other country may have high bandwidth, but it also probably has high tax subsidies.
This is like ethanol, which appears to be about equal to gasoline in price at the pump, but only because government taxes all of us so it can subsidize the price by about 50 cents per gallon. Peple who love ethanol cheer the fuel, but they are willingly ignorant of the economic damage it is doing elsewhere and they will fight tooth and nail to keep the subsidy, despite how many bridges we could repair with the billions we are spending on it every year.
We have similar ignorant laments from time to time about passenger rail. Look at other nations! Aren’t they so advanced in their rail service? We are so behind. Yes, indeed, we never hear how much it costs and how much of the taxes of the $6/gallon gasoline goes to pay for such a great rail system.
Lastly, these high speed links are not all they are cracked up to be when used for net access. If you run traceroute on any connection, you will find a connection goes through many routers and links, and the dirty secret of a high speed connection is this: the speed of your end-to-end connection is the speed of the slowest route segment.
A lot of our infrastructure was built by the CCC during the Depression. They installed 89,000 miles of telephone line.
I certainly don't advocate that now, but it's a fact that much of our telecom infrastructure was built by government employees.
Nowadays, the telcos have equipment that can install fiber lines far more efficiently that the original copper network was.