One of the reasons that other countries have "cooler" technology and higher bandwidth connections is that their country is much smaller. It is much less work to take fiber to every home in Korea (or even France) for instance than to connect via fiber all homes in a large country like the US. Similarly, since places like Korea are small, it is a small thing to replace all cell phone towers with upgraded ones supporting newer technologies, and therefore higher-tech phones.
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One of the reasons that other countries have "cooler" technology and higher bandwidth connections is that their country is much smaller. It is much less work to take fiber to every home in Korea (or even France) for instance than to connect via fiber all homes in a large country like the US. Similarly, since places like Korea are small, it is a small thing to replace all cell phone towers with upgraded ones supporting newer technologies, and therefore higher-tech phones.