One has 327 million people and an area of 9.8 million square kilometers (36 people per Km2). The other has 8.4 million people and 41 thousand square kilometers (216 people per Km2).

Switzerland has one of the highest and fastest internet penetration rates in Europe. If you rent an apartment, cable is often thrown in as part of the cost. The rest of the people's landlines are ADSL (which isn't very fast unless you use the latest ADSL2 dslams), or VDSL, which you can only get if you're very close to a CO. Finally, fiber is easier to roll out when you have a smaller population in a smaller area.

Most Americans cannot get VDSL, and the DSLAMs are old. Cable is pretty fast, and fiber is slowly getting rolled out, but it's a big freaking country, meaning this is expensive as hell.

The mobile providers in Switzerland only have to provide a very small number of broadband equipment and mobile towers compared to that needed to cover the US. Also, the same equipment used in Switzerland covers up to 6x more subscribers, because of increased population density.

The US has to provide much more equipment and installation over a much larger area to cover a comparatively smaller number of subscribers. So you have to literally buy more equipment to cover more area, and then you make less money because the equipment covers less subscribers on average. Upgrading the equipment then also becomes significantly more expensive.

One is extremely expensive, time-consuming and difficult to cover with high speed broadband, the other is not.

One has 327 million people and an area of 9.8 million square kilometers (36 people per Km2). The other has 8.4 million people and 41 thousand square kilometers (216 people per Km2).

Okay, but here in Sweden, with a population density of 22 people/km2, my mobile 4G internet plan has unlimited data, unlimited calls and messages for $55/month. I use it for both my phone and my 4G router at home. It's my only Internet connection since I live in a very rural place (a village of ~150 inhabitants in the north). I get about 13 Mbps downloads -- it would be much better if I was closer to a tower.

In cities in Sweden, which are all very small and not very dense, you can usually get 100 or 1000 Mbps fibre connections for something like $40 a month.

I am also not aware of a single cell data provider in Sweden that has ever tried to disable or charge for tethering.

In Wyoming, USA, the population density is 2.31/km2. But 100% of the people can get at least 10Mbps internet, 79% have >25Mbps internet. But again, big states, bigger country, and due to both governmental differences, differences in internet providers, and the different costs of providing service in different regions, we don't spread the cost of service out evenly.

It looks really easy when you're looking at the problem from 40,000 feet. On the ground, it's much more complicated.

I don't get the deal with tethering here, either, but I think there are probably reasons for it. If any provider here just threw tethering in for free, while undercutting the cost of the competitors, people would flock to them. The fact that this doesn't happen means it's probably hard to make money on it, for reasons unknown.

Currently, for $45, the best you can get on T-Mobile is 4GB of unlimited-speed tethered data, and for $70 you can get 512KB/s tethering. The cheapest mostly-unlimited data plan (including fewer limits for tethering) for one line costs $95. Older plans, which had cost less and had less limits, have been mostly phased out.

Another sad irony is to get the cheaper plan, you have to get a credit check, which dents your credit score, just to acquire a "pre-paid" plan. Also, T-Mobile's website seems to have been scrubbed of their prepaid plans, so probably you can only find details via interrogating their salespeople.