>It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though.
The internet isn't limited to a big city though, everything isn't mirrored in each large population center, that data has to cross vast distances.
And population density increases the need for more and more cable to be deployed, if you're feeding a podunk town of 5,000 people but NYC has 28,000~ people per square mile, San Francisco 19,000~ people per square mile, Chicago 11,600~ people per square mile.
Population dense areas are going to have a higher data consumption, a higher data consumption means you need that much more infrastructure at any given moment to handle peak.
Then factor in the United States has the 3rd largest number of internet users in the world, an estimated 292 million [1] and it is much more difficult to serve them all with the same level of service in a country orders of magnitude smaller with orders of magnitude fewer people.
The only country in Europe that begins to compare in both population and size is Russia at 1.8x larger land area and 44% of the population. Comparing physicall ysmall countries with 5-15 million. There are only 15 countries in Europe with populations over 10 million people, and only 1 of them (Russia) begins to come close to the US in size (being itself larger). The second largest country in Europe being The Ukraine and it's smaller than Texas.
You simply can't compare internet infrastructure in a random European country to the United States. It's like saying "Smart Cars get 40mpg, I don't see why NASA's Crawler-Transporter can't do 40mpg too, sounds like bad design!"
Bahnhof also build their own infrastructure using their signed up customers and hosting clients money. AFAIK, internet providers in the us don't and can't invest like this to improve speed and lower cost.
It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though.
We're not talking about the outback.