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The vast majority have some choice. The average household can choose between their telecom or their cable company. In some areas one or both of those companies
by rhino369 9y ago
The vast majority have some choice. The average household can choose between their telecom or their cable company. In some areas one or both of those companies don't provide broadband, but in the bulk of locations they do.
And while 4g service isn't a true replacement, it provides enough competition to prevent the AOL-ization of the internet. At a certain point, people would choose more expensive wireless over absurdly locked down wireline.
So while Comcast does have a monopoly in some areas, people would switch to Fios or Uverse or local DSL in the areas without monopoly if they tried anything too bad. Hypothetically comcast could try to monetize only in monopoly areas, but that would be a hard sell and it would be very transparent.
- vast_majority 9y ago"The vast majority have some choice" I challenge this assertion -> please document it.
- rhino369 9y ago60% of the country has three providers of 10mpbs+ 90% has two providers of 10mpbs+. One of those is satellite, which sort of sucks, I'll grant you that. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-broadband-still-no-isp-choice-for-many-especially-at-higher-speeds/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...
- vast_majority 9y agoThanks. I've lived in the north east since before there was IPSs and have never had a choice having lived in several town. Only people in one or two cities near me do. I'd agree satellite isn't a great choice and I am not really counting that (or dialup if it still exists). But is choosing between a telco like Verizon and Comcast/Charter really much of a choice either? So I think those numbers are miss leading. There doesn't feel like any choice to me.
- LocalH 9y ago10mbps isn't really useful nowadays. That's 10000kbps not including overhead. That's an absolute max of 1.25MiB per second, realistically if you get 1MiB you're doing well. Back that down a little bit to account for the inability to always reach peak bandwidth, say to 896kiB, and you start to see how you're very limited for common usage. Even web browsing is quite heavy nowadays.
- s73ver_ 9y ago60% of the country's CENSUS DISTRICTS. Not 60% of the US. If one person in that district has access to the provider, it counts as the whole district, even though that's likely not true.
- vel0city 9y agoOnly a little over 50% of households have at least 2 high-speed internet choices[0]. I wouldn't call that the "vast majority". [0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-million-us-homes-have-only-one-25mbps-internet-provider-or-none-at-all/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...
- rhino369 9y ago25mbps is an arbitrary limit that leaves out ATT and Century links ADSL2+ service, which is fine for most uses.
- jermaustin1 9y agoYou will have a hard time streaming Netflix/Hulu/VOD on anything < 25mbps.
- rhino369 9y agoShould get you to 720p.
- lovehashbrowns 9y agoI tried that. It really doesn't, especially when there's congestion. I've had to go down to 240p on Youtube before, especially if I was trying to do something else in the background, e.g. watch Youtube while doing homework, watch Youtube while browsing Reddit/news/any other website with giant JS/CSS/media files/ads. I was primarily a student then, and trying to skip around in Youtube/online video lectures was an insanely frustrating experience.
- Lev1a 9y agoIn a day and age where most of the TVs and monitors sold right now are 1080p and up, 720p is not an acceptable maximum resolution for streaming anymore.
- thirdsun 9y ago
- dawnerd 9y agoI live in a fairly tech heavy area in the PNW and still only have the choice between fiber or super slow dsl. Not really much of a choice if you ask me.