The cost of fixed-line broadband in 206 countries

Essentially, entrenched players are given the pens to write their own rules under a banner that reads "deregulation" effectively locking themselves in more.

Then people blame "the government" for this problem and hand the pens over to the companies again to write even more rules that favor themselves.

Pointing out this brazenly obvious pattern is shouted down as socialist or leftist, which makes it a Forbidden Thought in America so it continues unabated out in the open. It's pretty remarkable.

If you recall the drama of Google Fiber and other relatively recent attempts to rollout fiber, the existing companies have often gotten local and state laws passed making it extremely difficult to add competitive services at a more reasonable cost.

Competiton is rare because of several factors. The most important one being overbuilding a new network on an area with existing wiring is expensive, time consuming, and unlikely to result in enough customers to make a good return on investment; especially since the incumbent networks are likely to respond by upgrading their network, usually faster than the overbuild. For a historical example, look at Google's fiber build out announcement for 10 or so cities, followed by AT&Ts announcement for most of the same cities, and then Google's retraction after AT&T actually built the network, and Google hadn't even got planning approval for their Fiber boxes.

The solution is local loop unbundling, as congress provided in the telecom act of 1996, and the FCC dismantled over the ensuing decade. Ideally, more fully realised as in other countries, where the local loop provider(s) are never the service providers. It doesn't make sense to run a large number of networks to the same houses in the same city; instead, that part should be leasable, with providers servicing the connections from central locations.

The costs of all of the service delivery components drop over time — automation eliminated many of the expensive positions and the costs of switching and other gear has been in free fall for years.

My brother in law lives about 1000 yards from my house, in a suburban town. I’m in the city. My spectrum internet is $70 for 75 down, he pays $32 for 150. Spectrum is not losing money.

The difference? The town has FIOS. Verizon isn’t moving into the city because the margins on future 5G connectivity is much higher than FIOS.

Your choices are: cable (either Comcast or Spectrum, pretty much everyone else has been acquired into one of these), ADSL1 (3 Mbps or less), LTE ($10-15/GB used, no carrier actually has an unlimited plan and they will terminate you for using a phone plan SIM in your hotspot, all heavily DPI and modify your traffic). In rare areas, AT&T or similar offer "home internet" (250GB cap $60/m on contract) over LTE.

Comcast, Spectrum, et al have long since advertised fiber (they do coax/cable). They brag about their fast fiber network in an attempt to mislead people in the US that don't know better. Last mile is cable, and upstream is generally sub-10Mbps + because the last mile is cable, your latency for things such as video games are significantly worse (15ms vs <1ms to something in the same city).

In fact, Comcast does not even list upload speeds on their site anymore the last time I checked. No matter how hard you drill down, click Details, read the fine print, etc. This is incredibly good for "shut up and consume media" and incredibly bad for "learn, upload, create". On top of that, they repeatedly use the word gigabit for plans offering sub-ADSL upload speeds. They do not mention upload. It appears that currently the highest tier plans on Comcast offer up to 35 Mbps upload based on HN comments and DSLReports forum posts.

Comcast and their cable friends also repeatedly attempt to use their billions to sue small towns into the ground when they try to start a community broadband project[0][1][2][..etc]. Trying to start muni fiber is a great way to drown in lawsuits from every incumbent provider that _does not even serve your area or have plans to serve your area_, they just want to set a precedent. Like they literally do not care for your city at all and do not plan to ever offer service there because it's a waste of money to them, but they will happily spend many millions trying to kill this.

Contracts are usually mandatory, signed for several years, along with other anticompetitive things like requiring the use of their remotely-administered equipment that you are locked out of, or charging you large fees to use your own. For example, ludicrously low bandwidth caps on Comcast, where they charge you the cost of an unmetered gigabit plan in most countries just to remove the cap. But you can get a discount if you use their remotely-controlled hardware that also requires you to sign in to your account to view your wifi password and runs a public hotspot off it.

[EDIT BASED ON COMMENT REPLIES: OK, contracts are no longer mandatory these days, but in reality you are going to pay at minimum 1.5x to 2x the cost per month without the contract discount, at least on Comcast. For the vast majority of the US, they will often take this, eat the hard credit inquiry hit to save on the money, though.]

There are a few incumbent-esque fiber providers like Frontier that offer bizarre speed choices and mandatory contracts (2 years is often the case), which cap out at something like 200 Mbps for "FTTH" which is odd, and has useful support roughly equivalent to Comcast on a good day. These providers also have spent money lobbying on the above instead of, I don't know, updating their networks.

Generally in any location in the US (with exceptions like in SF, Seattle, Oakland, etc. where you are lucky enough to live in a MDU with multiple fiber providers or a municipal broadband area), you do not actually have a free choice of provider, it's either cable or ADSL1. Almost no provider of DSL does VDSL or ADSL2+ or similar; if you are in an area that demands DSL it's likely you are sitting at 3-6Mbps down and sub-1Mbps up. Almost no provider will bond multiple DSL lines.

In most other countries, DSL is generally significantly more tolerable to use (and I love the fritzbox compared to the abomination of ISP-provided hardware I've seen in the US), which is probably one of the reasons why people think the US has choices when it comes to DSL. They have VDSL2 - the US has ADSL1 that caps at 3 Mbps on a good day and goes out when it rains; DSL is the "I have no other options" choice, not the first choice. For example, in Germany, 1&1's $25 DSL plan actually beats Comcast 'gigabit' on upload.

[0] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc... (potentially biased source; affiliate advertising for home internet)

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-comcas...

[2] https://muninetworks.org/content/mediacom-lawyers-slow-compe...

For example, I can go to Bell Canada, and spot they have the following prices (prices converted to USD from CAD):

* $23 for 10mbit/s with 100GB cap

* $40 for 50mbit/s

* $75 for 100mbit/s

* $90 for 1 gbit/s

Also I spot checked a couple of suburbs in quebec city (because everything I'd heard indicated the above was suspicious) to see what the internet availability was like, and the ones I checked all only offered DSL at:

* $55 for 5mbit/s with no cap

* $46 for 5mbit/s with 50GB cap

We're not talking the sticks or some frozen house up super far north here, we're talking suburbs of a decently sized city.

Compared to my own ISP, Virgin Media Ireland (prices are post 6 month-introductory prices converted from EUR to USD):

* $70 for 250mbit/s

* $85 for 500mbit/s

* $100 for 1gbit/s

They are available in most of the area of our cities and most medium sized towns also.

I also checked with eir, who are effectively the ISP of last resort for my parents home where you get DSL also, and they offer:

* $35 for 40mbit/s

My understanding is this is VDSL2, but not fibre to the cabinet at their particular exchange. The pricing tier is for 100mbit/s but eir are at least upfront with the fact you won't get this at their address.

This is a village of a few hundred people that's not along a major infrastructure route between cities or large towns. However, reliability and contention would likely be as bad as the Canadian option from when I lived there.

We're not the netherlands here or some of the other central European countries with gigabit for €20/month in Ireland, but I'd still take it over Canadian internet, while the chart implies it to be worse.

For all practical purposes the CIS is completely useless and the term itself fell out of circulation by now (even in the member countries).