Om (and many others) are talking about how European fiber to the home networks are starting to pop up everywhere: plans have been announced for Amsterdam, Paris, and now Vienna. ADSL2+ is everywhere, triple-play is cheap, and incumbents are under massive competition. Broadband Europe is on fire compared to the US.

But I’ve just returned from the US, where I was astonished to see ads for mobile phone plans around $40 per month for 1,500 minutes! Good luck finding a deal like that anywhere in Europe. Yeah, yeah… US penetration is still lower, Americans don’t SMS as much, etc. But the fact is that American mobile telephony is far, far cheaper than in Europe- and price is the most important attribute, so in my book that makes the American market far more advanced than Europe’s.

Funny, because six years ago it was the opposite: Europe was easily ahead of the US in mobile, and the US easily ahead of Europe in Internet access.

Link:  Om Malik on Broadband : » Now Vienna Plans a Fiber Network