> The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) internet is shite...
Speak for yourself, but I live on the west coast and my Internet connection is great.
Edit: downvoters, what are the problems with U.S. internet?
Speak for yourself, but I live on the west coast and my Internet connection is great.
Edit: downvoters, what are the problems with U.S. internet?
For me, internet is great (both wired and wireless). For wired, I have a choice of cable and FTTH in my apartment, both cancelable month-by-month and without any bullshit fees ("taxes and surcharges", yeah, believe it or not I also pay taxes and I don't make it your problem, ISP!) beyond the sticker price.
No idea if this is due to competition, regulation, or both; I suspect that at least the "no bullshit fees" part is due to the latter, as I can't imagine major US corporations all somehow collectively dropping them in one region but not the other.
I also don't doubt that it is significantly worse for somebody living elsewhere. Data caps seem to still be a thing for wired access in some places.
London: look for a good offer, phone up a few ISPs, get a quote, work out if we have spare capacity in the building (we did) boom, 1 gigabit install inside a month.
Redwood city: 6 months. we had some sort of shitty T3 line installed as a stopgap. It never reached SLA. I had to phone the NOX, get a report. I then phoned the EMEA president of $large_International_network_provider to complain personally that I had to do the work of half his fucking company to get dailup++ installed. I left before they managed to get actual fibre into the building.
Santa Monica: "we cant install fibre as the previous engineer reported seeing eyes under the building" Try and use a different company. Turns out that there is only that company in santa monica (Can't remember which) Ok, order an upgrade to what we already have. "line is bad needs replacing" cue me having to _fucking fly out_ and manage the fourth attempt at upgrading because the company are such useless fucking pricks.
domestic wise
I am in the suburbs, they've just rolled out fibre to the house. I have 900 meg down with 100(might be more) up for £50 a month. Thats the pricy version with a fixed ipv4 address.
I can get a less fancy version for £30.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/689876/average-mobile-sp...
Most people in urban areas can get deals like 300-500Mbps for < €30/month. I have symmetric 1Gbps and pay about the same, could get 8Gbps for €80 but have no use for it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_In...
My provider is SFR (the only one giving access to optical fiber in the small village where I live).
EDIT: I'm talking about home internet. For mobile internet, I pay 19.99€/month for unlimited access (5G), but I haven't done a speedtest.
The ISP that I currently use - Comcast Xfinity - is also the only cable provider in this area. I can get some mobile and satellite options, but they are all more expensive for lower speed and higher latency.
My current service is 130 a month for 200/20.
Its getting replaced: 50 bucks a month for 10gig fiber.
It's going to cost me 800 ish bucks to set up to take advantage of that (routing, switching, nic's)... I will still come out way ahead before the end of the year.
Competition has its benefits.
You're saying your Internet is fast enough for you, and that's fine and probably correct, but you're still getting slower speeds for higher prices than you should. You're also likely better situated than much of the rest of the country.
It never makes sense to me when people say how the US ranks last among developed countries on a bunch of metrics. Of course, that just means the US is indeed... less developed than those countries. If it's not fair to compare the US to Somalia, it's not fair to compare it to Sweden either. It just is what it is, somewhere between the two development extremes.
It’s also entirely factual to say that in comparison to other developed countries, the US lags in internet.
> other countries roughly in the same range as the US.
The same range of what variable? How do you measure/define this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country
I’m not sure how you can possibly argue that the US is not “developed”.
> The same range of what variable? How do you measure/define this?
Feel free to take any of those lists and compare the US to countries around them in those lists. The countries might differ slightly, but the notion of what is a “developed” country has been firmly established for a long time now.
The U.S. is considered developed only because it’s extremely rich. However, the general state of its infrastructure, education, governance, media, etc. is more typical of a developing country in many ways.
That’s my point: all these lists of things the U.S. is worse at than every developed country are collectively what it means to be developed, more so in my mind than just being rich.
Wtf!? Yes!
Now I'm curious what you thought developed means.
Anyway you're ignoring income. Seattle is around triple the median of France for example. You need to compare cities of similar size and income.
And what is your solution to that?
Actual speeds are more like 5/7. But I’m happy!
Even if you deliver, surely you know that such a connection is an extreme, extreme outlier?
https://www.sonic.com/residential/internet
Looks like the prices must vary by location. They don’t have a price there.
$40/month (if you don't rent a modem/eerio, which, why would you) for 10 gigs up and down, not to mention excellent customer service.
But I will happily admit that they're a bit of an outlier and the offerings in much of the country are complete shit.
once you get outside of truly major metro areas, internet access tends to go to shit.
i've got 1G fiber internet in Seattle now, but in Everett ~25M shared access comcast is the best you can do in a lot of places. and it isn't like you need to be surrounded by cows and horses to have bad internet, you can have the boeing factory just down the road, but you're living in a ~100k population city as opposed to a tech hub.