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Comment by Sohcahtoa82 | Hacker News Reader

Hah yeah I remember my dad getting an e-mail like that back in like 1996.

We were paying for an unlimited connection, and then they tried to tell us that if we wanted to be connected for more than 4 hours/day, we'd have to upgrade to a business account that was like 4x the price. My dad told them to pound sand and we switched ISPs.

Pretty sure between 1995 and 1997, we switched dialup ISPs like 4 times because each tried to tell us we were abusing the "unlimited" access. And then at some point, cable modems came out and the entire thing became moot.

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At least switching ISPs back then meant essentially signing up for an account and changing phone numbers. Now there's all this physical infra to deal with, yuck :)

In Utah, if you have Utopia, its about as easy as it was with Dial-up. You just go sign up a new provider, change a few settings on your router, and you're done.

Takes literally eight minutes after clicking ‘submit order’ to churn to a new ISP on my Australian NBN connection. The connection is down for a total of 45 seconds between them!

In the UK in the early 90s we had to pay

1) The ISP a monthly charge

2) The ISP a per-minute charge (these were things like cix, compuserve, aol, etc)

3) the phone company a per-minute charge

Later we had ISPs that didn't have a per-minute charge (Demon and the like), so it was just the monthly charge and the per minute charge to the phone company. Even later than that ISPs which were just a per-minute charge to the phone company came along. In the late 90s I think the phone company per minute charge was about 4p/minute in the day, so for anyone in the UK that would be about 9p per minute today, or if you ran your modem full pelt, about 36p per Megabyte.

Towards the late 90s you could have a flat fee phone charge, then dsl and cable came along.

Demon tenner a month account revolutionized dialup internet in Britain during the mid-90s. Then BT announced the Friends and Family plan and you could add you xyz666 number to that plan to save 5%. Those were the days!

Except now you're limited to 2 TB/mo with no alternatives.

I remember my 56k modem running at less than half the advertised speed, and having to pay by the minute for the privilege, and that the phone number originally being "local rate" shifting into "lo-call rate" as actual local calls became cheaper.

2 TB would have taken me nearly 16 years, and cost as much as a house.

Well, if you go 2 TB over, it might still cost as much as a house.

Depends on your area.

I'm in a suburb outside Portland, OR and have Ziply Fiber which sells me symmetrical gigabit with no data cap for like $80/month.

Just went from my unmetered symmetric gigabit for $90 to unmetered symmetric 10gig for $49! Sonic, SF Bay area. Considering I'm in the middle of silicon valley it sure took a long time to actually get fiber (2019), but now I'm not complaining.

Here in France Free sells me 5Gb/700Mb fiber for 40€ a month, and takes off 10€ off of my phone bill for the trouble as well.

Here in Australia we have been pretty blessed with pretty good ISPs. In the earlier days we had Internode (locally here in Perth it was iiNet for me for a while :)), which had a Usenet mirror (!) and were the first ISP I believe to offer ADSL2 in AU. Unfortunately in 2011 they were bought out by a major competitor and it went downhill.

Nowdays we have Aussie Broadband, which has an active tech community on Whirlpool (AU Broadband forums, fondly called Whingepool). Phil Brett as their cofounder made this an incredible company, and he recently left.

I pay $149AUD/month for "1000/50Mbps Unlimited", which I haven't had an email yet for my usage (I use around 4-10tb/month).

I haven't heard about Aussie Broadband before. I take it you would recommend them then?

I hadn't known about Internode going downhill either. I'm still using them as their support is great. Price-wise looks like they both charge the same. Unfortunately no great connection here, so it ends at $100AUD for 100Mbps on a good day.

They've got the best support, for sure. But how often do you need support?

Our business is with Superloop 1000/50 ($109, and actually gets 1000Mbps solidly). Used to be with MyRepublic and would get between 300-700Mbps depending on time of day.

At home we just use a cheap provider - Spintel. It seems that for the lower speeds (we're on 50/20) you don't run into CVC issues like you used to.

You are right, I almost never need support but when I do I appreciate it. Apparently they have a flag for accounts of people who know IT stuff. Found that out when my partner ended up talking to them and she got a bit flustered over the questions they asked.

I also like to think of it as doing my bit against the enshittification of everything. Cheap internet is a race to the bottom and it's not pretty.

But Aussie Broadband looks pretty promising. I like that they are open about CVC issues. Will consider them next time we move.

I'm amazed you throw these ISP names out there that I never heard of before. Probably not doing advertisements and bill boards and stuff. Maybe the internet situation in Australia is not as bleak as I always thought :)

The motherlode of Australian ISP inside knowledge and recommendations is likely still Whirlpool forums where noobs and line engineers rub shoulders.

eg:

Choosing an ISP https://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum/92

RIP Broadband Choice tables: https://bc.whirlpool.net.au/

Thank you, much appreciated!

I lucked out and got FIOS installed on my street about 6 months before the Xfinity caps went into effect in my area. When they asked me why I was canceling I tore them a new one

Comcast? I have att fiber and I can pull down 5-10tb/mo no problem.

I wish, here my only option is Xfinity with 1.2 TB per month.

In the late 90s I moved to an area that did not yet have broadband, so my choices were either 56k modem or pay out the nose for ISDN or similar. I got a 2nd phone line, and went the modem route but left it connected 24/7. I kept getting banned from the local ISPs for this exact reason. Luckily I moved out of the area before I ran out of ISPs available without paying long distance charges!

My dad ran a small business from home, I never got told to get off the internet so someone could make a phone call. But yelled at to get off the 2nd line so a fax could come in? Yeah, countless times.

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