It certainly seems pointless to have the conversation without even attempting to separate out that question. North America is much less densely populated than Europe, and the capital and maintenance costs of network infrastructure must surely be higher. If those are providers’ main costs (?), that alone could explain most of the difference.
But it’s a complicated question. The backhaul part of wireless networks (i.e. the mostly-wired connections that carry data between cells) has the same financial characteristics as wired networks in the same region, since it’s more or less the same physical network. The cells themselves are a little different, because a single tower in Nebraska might cover an area larger than New York City, so the cost isn’t a linear function of geographic area like it is for wired networks; it may be that North America doesn’t need many more cell towers per capita than Europe does. To the extent that’s the case, then the relevant number is not the absolute cost of wireless service, but its cost relative to local wired access (which is also far more expensive in the US).
Broadly speaking, there is no competition in wired networks. You can have phone / cable / broadband / wireless companies “competing” to give you access to the same wires, but mostly they can only compete on the added-value part, which, in something this far from being a free market, can often look a lot like price-fixing.
The linked article presupposes that (what we are pretending to be) free-market competition is the only variable to consider. In my biased view, that is a pretty loaded way to frame the question. Europe may dress up its national telecom monopolies with more semi-fake competition, but I suspect it also regulates the underlying monopolies more heavily. If that’s why Europeans pay less, the linked article doesn’t seem interested in finding out.
(I’ll admit that when it comes to wireless, the competition is not totally fake, as carriers do run separate, competing towers. But without going into detail, I’m still not convinced that provides any great benefit compared to nationalising the whole system)
