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Comment by willis936 | Hacker News Reader

>300Mbps symmetrical speeds for $55/month

Eye watering. Broadband pricing is consistent in most places throughout the country and the aggressive asymmetry of upload feels like nothing short of rent seeking. In places where you can get fiber (barring the few communities that already have it fully deployed) costs $300/mo. for symmetrical gig. The next option down is broadband with 35 Mbps upload at $120/mo.

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I live in a smaller metropolitan area in the southeast and 400 down/20 up is $95 a month because I don’t bundle it with other services. Fast.com maxes at 200 down so I think they are throttling certain things. I get 400 when using their Speedtest. I want to do some automated testing/logging throughout the day for a good month to have some good data to share with them but not having any broadband alternatives means they ultimately don’t care. I had the faster service for a year when it was randomly set back to the base speed. Calling and complaining about it and it gets fixed but no compensation as I couldn’t tell them exactly when it was changed and they had ‘no clue’. This was after arguing over a $99 upgrade fee initially when I increased speed. She said it was required for the tech to ensure my service was working properly. But wouldn’t have to send a tech to my home. I got that fee waived eventually after explaining I was trying to pay them extra every month and I knew for a fact a tech wasn’t doing anything specific to my account to ensure it worked as I used to work at charter and knew the provisioning process. Oh yah... they were just as scummy of a company to work for. I can only imagine things will get worse with Spectrum after their ‘no caps’ agreement expires from the Time Warner merger.

I have symmetric 1gbps from Sonic in San Francisco for $60/month and a VoIP phone line to boot.

I’ve heard of many other ISPs in the US closer to this number too.

Note none of them are the big ISPs. All of the consolidation and removal of the local ISP has been terrible for the consumer. I get that it’s far more expensive now to start one than it was with dial up, but there needs to be a better path forward that decentralizes control and ownership of infrastructure. Particularly this BS of only ever having 1 real broadband choice in a given zip code.

I’d love to see all the recent anti-trust fervor get pointed towards the Comcast’s of the world and understand how they as cartels have unofficially split up the country.

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