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Comment by mkohlmyr | Hacker News Reader

> UK people are very happy with their internet service

Heh. I'm sure its a lot better than what you're working with but personally coming from Sweden I feel like in the U.K. I'm getting worse service (offers, speeds, customer service and support, waiting for and dealing with BT Openreach engineers, hardware not working, getting the run-around between Openreach and utility providers, ..) for more money than we did back home.

That being said I'm sure dealing with Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T is a million times worse.

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I second that. I move from Poland to UK and the service is a lot worse in every way.

As an American I find that Poland's service being so great seems so embarrassing to me. How can we embarrass our ISP and our politicians to use that fact to upgrade what we get? No offense to Poland but the US is supposed to lead the world in stuff if for no other reason than our huge size and economic power. Yet our internet service is far below average? What does Poland do that makes this work so well?

On Ookla's NetIndex, Poland is slower on average than the U.S., and significantly slower than U.S. states with comparable density, such as Pennsylvania or New York.

The reason everyone is so impressed by countries like Poland is that their central governments proactively got fiber installed in major cities. In the U.S., that sort of thing is up to state and municipal governments. What's stopping us from wiring up San Francisco or New York or Chicago with fiber? Insane local politics. Right now, people in Chicago are flipping out because of the signage on the Trump tower. People in San Francisco halted FTTN deployment because they didn't like the look of AT&T's network cabinets. Even Google doesn't dare enter these markets.

If AT&T used modern FTTP equipment instead of legacy FTTN equipment, there wouldn't be so many ugly, expensive, unreliable and vandalism-prone cabinets.

Don't get fooled by the phone company, FTTP is the least cost solution in the long term in EVERY situation.

Also this is only a problem in a few big cites; if you go to any normal community in any of the flyover states, Democrat or Republican, they want good broadband so bad they will bend over backwards to get it.

FTTN is both fine on its own right, and a good incremental step toward FTTP. Its the basis for BT's broadband strategy in the U.K., which everyone holds up as great model.

As for this not being a problem flyover country, you're right. But flyover country also doesn't have the density for good bang for buck infrastructure development. The reason why places like Poland and Romania stand out is they combine the density of major American cities with the desparation to stand out. Warsaw wants to be the next San Francisco. San Francisco doesn't.

rayiner could be right. I noticed a few times when one district builds a road and they fail to cooperate with another , so the road ends in the middle of nowhere. Local governments, due to corruption and political reasons cannot cooperate effectively.

I do believe in free markets and little regulations, but in this case central government should act.

Spent nearly 5hrs on the phone with Comcast last week to get them to un-screwup my account and provide the service they agreed to provide. It's working now, but now they're billing me for someone else's account as well. Comcast has fully accomplished being the worst company in america.

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