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Comment by fowlerpower | Hacker News Reader

ISPs need to be disrupted so badly. This was actually one of the few initiatives that I thought would really force everyone to change.

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ATT is rolling out new fiber (and running fiber they already had at decent speeds), Comcast has their 2G offering and a 1G doccis offering.

Speeds have changed, but the fundamental issue is still there: It's impractical to have robust competition in the last mile, and nobody wants to wholesale last mile and make competition an option. Google fiber's early press releases included it, but stopped before they started building. The 1996 telecom act included it, but the FCC abandoned it in the last decade.

While Comcast does offer higher speeds, it's prohibitively expensive. In a typical market where Comcast has an effective monopoly the 2Gb service is $300/month and even just 250Mb is $150. Their upload speeds are also pathetic, the 250Mb service is only 30Mb up.

Yes, the 2G service is expensive (it's also delivered over 10G fiber, rate limited on the required router), but their 1G service is more reasonable (i saw $140 on http://www.xfinity.com/gig-offer ), not sure what the upload is, and availability is meager, of course.

The question is whether it's symmetric speeds and in-metered. Asymmetric speeds with caps is a fantastic way to offer 1Gb speeds with almost none of the real benefits or innovation opportunities.

Those are symmetric(!); the real killer is the contract duration, the installation/activation fees (up to $1000 total), and the installation time frame (up to 8 weeks).

The 2G is symmetric, but I'm not sure about the 1G

For comparison, I pay 50€/month for 200/10 Mbps in Germany (including some phone / TV service that I don't use)

I pay 34€ a month for 100/100 Mbps in Portugal, including TV and Phone too. And that's because I missed the promotion for a few days or it would be 25€/month.

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