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Comment by jayess | Hacker News Reader

> Just look at what is happening to telecommunication services, with big corporations growing their profits while Americans get stuck with slow and expensive service that becomes relatively worse comparing to other western countries.

I get 1 gig internet service for $80 a month in a mid-sized American city in the midwest. No complaints here. The offerings just keep getting better and cheaper.

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You must realize that is not the norm though, right?

It wasn't until Google Fiber came into my area that everyone else starting offering competitive pricing, but the vast majority of land in the US is a high speed broadband wasteland.

Google fiber never came here. It was Verizon 5g that made Comcast and at&t offer gigabit internet in my neighborhood. I was even ready to shell out the $2k setup fee and Comcast was like mmm no gigabit for you.

So I don’t believe it is subsidy I fully believe it is competition. Google realized that it’s incredibly difficult and expensive to lay fiber and stopped. 5G realized they don’t need fiber to be competitive.

Competition always ends in a win for the customer

FWIW Google is still rolling fiber in my market.

And you are right, it's not subsidies, it's engineered monopolies causing the problem which is why you see the competition actually working.

Google had to use microtrenching because they couldn't get access to existing rights of ways on telephone poles owned by other providers, mainly AT&T in my area.

Depends on your state. My state allows pole sharing but a 48hour line break fix req or other providers can “fix” it for you and etc

Its really expensive to run an isp here

Not only is it EXTREMELY rare to get 1 gig internet anywhere in the US (I just got it in Silicon Valley, 3 months ago) (btw, hopefully this is symmetric FTTH), but that price is extremely far from impressive in the places that get similar speeds.

I’ve got 3x1gigabit connections for a total of $160/mo and I live in the us of a!

From an EU country with 1 gig for about $30 a month (city with about 500k people) that doesn't look very cheap.

Even in Belgium, we have better price, and we have the most extensive prices in EU.

In places like Romania, you can get internet service for a fraction of that price.

I was curious how that compared with prices of other goods/services so I found this: https://checkinprice.com/cost-of-living-in-bucharest-romania...

    Monthly public transport ticket 14.55 USD
    1 ticket to the movies (adult price) 5.70 USD
    High speed internet per month 9.50 USD
    1 month gym subscription 41.30 USD

Assuming that's accurate, other stuff is cheaper than US cities but not by nearly as much as internet service. I could go for a $10/month high speed connection.

Yep, this is exactly my point. A lot of stuff in various European cities isn't cheaper, or not that much cheaper, than internet service, so internet service in America is comparatively overpriced.

Of course, everything else in America is overpriced too, and you're not actually getting a better overall experience for that money. If it were an extremely safe, clean, and well-managed country, then it'd make sense for the cost-of-living to be high, but it isn't: gun violence is an epidemic, environmental regulations are being gutted, and the political leadership is utterly incompetent. And don't get me started on what an utter disaster the healthcare system is.

It's accurate. Just got back from spending a few weeks at my dad's country house that's wired with 940/450mbps fiber. No problems remote working from there, except, of course, time zone differences. Here's the ISP link, in Romanian unfortunately: https://www.digiromania.ro/servicii/internet/internet-fix/fi.... The price is 40 Lei / month, which is approximately $9.5 at current exchange rates.

What kind of speeds do you get to non aws, gcp, and azure sites? I’ve found in my travels that you get ridiculous speeds to “net neutral” sites but once you go off the grid you’re back down to T1 speeds.

Like good luck seeing 10mbps+ to a server in the US. In the us I know my transfer speed is limited by the router I’m hitting. So I can go to .jp sites and still pull 30mbit

That's expensive compared to elsewhere in the world.

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