Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

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My parents still live in the house I grew up in. It's about 30 miles from the nearest big city, a top-10 U.S. city.

- They had dial-up until the early 2000s.

- Then they had that terrible asymmetric satellite service where the upstream service was also dial-up. That lasted a couple of years.

- Then they got some kind of two-way sat service. Still terrible latency, but tolerable for the time.

- Finally, sometime in the early 2010s cable television service made its way to their neighborhood. Television, not internet.

- About 2015 they were finally able to get cable internet, which they have today. It's an amazing 5mb/sec up/down.

When I go there I just tether to my phone because its faster. They never got DSL. I bet they'll never get fiber. Starlink could be a serious improvement to them even at 2x the price they pay now.

So why can't they get Internet via a phone like you do when you go there?

Data caps and throttling make it prohibitively expensive.

I’ve done it for weeks in the past, and (what I personally consider normal usage) burned through my monthly cap in a week, leaving me with large overage charges that wouldn’t be sustainable long-term. I haven’t heard of a US carrier-provided plan that’s less than several hundreds of dollars, and if there is one it’s likely unavailable in rural areas

There's actually resellers that are made for rural areas with unlimited data. They are quite expensive, but not several hundreds of dollars expensive. I'm pretty sure I have seen some less expansive but here's one: https://unlimitedville.com/plans

For a year my family used 4G as our home internet (this was around 8 years ago). At the time it was incredibly expensive because you pay by the gig used, and the pay scale is built around using a couple of gigs. Watching a couple of episodes on netflix bumps you into a higher tier for the month. Downloading and then uploading a single 1GB artifact for work could bump you up 2 tiers. I've looked around a bit, and the situation doesn't look much better today; you can pay for a certain data cap, and then pay something like $10 / month / GB over that.

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