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The real story here is how great the internet service can be now in a civilized country if you don't let Comcast have monopolies and ban local internet cooperat
by Bud 5y ago
The real story here is how great the internet service can be now in a civilized country if you don't let Comcast have monopolies and ban local internet cooperatives and coast along selling the same service for 15 years while raising prices.
25Gbps symmetric for about $70/month. That's significantly less than I pay Comcast for its crappy 900Mbps down/40Mbps up service.
- nixgeek 5y agoAt least in PNW the service isn’t 900/40 any more, it’s advertised as “1.2Gbps” and the profile actually seems to be 20% over that, I’ve seen 1.5Gbps or 170-180MB/sec downstream performance recently. Upstream is still <= 50Mbps and otherwise agree with your comment that the U.S. is falling behind in price-throughput on domestic internet services versus many other developed nations.
- wormslayer666 5y agoThere have always been regional variations in this; I've had the same 1.2GBps plan in a few states now and it only ever got close to that number in the one where Fios was an option. Comcast's only innovation in the last few years has been to add data caps to residential fiber service (my 300mb/s "1.2 GBps" is capped at 1.4TB/mo).
- nixgeek 5y agoWe’ve just been paying a $30/mo upcharge for unlimited data (removal of overage charges). Basically because it’s more predictable than the $10 for every 50GB overages. A few months we’ve had 4-5TB through the service and Comcast doesn’t seem to have slowed us down or charged more.
- Bud 5y agoLet's please not further the idea that it's acceptable to quote only downstream speed when citing Internet speeds. Doing that just leads to 20 more years of Comcast killing the concept of modern Internet service for Americans. Cite both numbers.
- Aeolun 5y agoI consider only symmetric speeds real internet.
- icedchai 5y agoIt's sad how difficult it is to get symmetric speeds in some parts of the US. Around here, the cable company was actually lowering upstream speeds for some users. They raised their downstream though. This was an attempt to encourage them to upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1, I think. Once enough users upgrade they can start doing fancier stuff, like allocating more upstream channels. Maybe by 2030.
- walrus01 5y agoUpstream on cable like that will be sub 50 Mbps because they're very intentionally only using a small number of rf channels on the coax for upstream. This is why in my opinion docsis3 is putting lipstick on a pig and is only a short term stop gap solution. The better end state is proper SM fiber to each house.
- icedchai 5y agoYep, even DOCSIS 3.1 modems don't do much for upstream, since generally it remains at 3.0. They have to do physical upgrades, such as amplifier swaps, to actually add more channels and make DOCSIS 3.1 OFDM upstream possible. That seems like years of work, and won't happen any time soon.
- throwawayswede 5y agoThat's cronyism for you.
- bluedino 5y agoWe have a couple fiber companies in our town (USA), and we have been shopping for internet. Currently we have fiber from AT&T. One is over a mile down the road and they want $90,000 to connect and then $1750 a month for 1gbps. Another company is two blocks away, they will only charge $8,000 to connect and it’s $1,550 a month for the same speed. Problem is there aren’t many other companies in the area that want service, so we would end up paying all the buildout costs. The other business are small retail, restaurants and shops that don’t need more than coax (150/20 or whatever for $79/month) from Spectrum.
- xupybd 5y agoI'm in New Zealand, a small island nation. I have 1gbps for around $70 USD per month. The install was free. I get a VoIP phone and Prime video subscription included. Most of my devices are wireless so I really don't take advantage of the speed.
- timClicks 5y agoWhich ISP are you with?
- xupybd 5y ago2 Degree's. They bundled it all with my cell plan.
- hackcasual 5y agoI hit ~400mbps on my pixel 4a's wifi with 802.11ac in a moderately congested environment. With WiFi 6 I would probably saturate
- Jnr 5y agoI pay about 17 USD for 1 Gbps in Europe.
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- RKearney 5y agoI'm sure the fact that Germany has a 566% larger population density and is 96.19% smaller than the United States has a lot to do with a countries ability to bring 25Gbps internet to its citizens.
- nix23 5y ago>I'm sure the fact that Germany Sorry to disappoint you, but it not Sweden or Germany but Switzerland...Germany has bad internet too, but hey that mistake happens even to the best ones (like Bush Junior)
- RKearney 5y agoNot a disappointment at all. I see now that it is indeed Switzerland. The mention of the Germany based IX upgrading to 25Gbps towards the end of the article threw me off. But Switzerland has a 504% larger population density and 99.56% smaller land area as compared to the United States so my point still stands.
- nix23 5y agoIs the density higher then New-York? https://broadbandnow.com/New-York https://broadbandnow.com/New-York >26.1% of New Yorkers have access to 1 gigabit broadband.
- hda111 5y agoInternet in Germany is really bad and expensive compared to Switzerland and even to the rest of Europe. In Germany fiber to the home is maybe 1-2% of all internet connections. Most fiber providers in Germany offer only artificial asymmetric connections and are very expensive.
- walrus01 5y agoSolving the last mile facilities based isp problem in detached houses in the USA and Canada is a hard one. In most places with aerial Telecom and power infrastructure, you will have three things coming to a house. Electricity, obviously. And then whatever is the local phone company, and the local incumbent cable TV company. If you're unlucky enough to live in a place where the phone company is operating old degraded DSL on copper phone lines, and doesn't care to overbuild it with single mode fiber for GPON, and the cable TV company is also something similarly large and slightly evil like Comcast, you're almost out of luck. This is a political and regulatory problem that allows the local franchise agreement for the phone company and cable tv company to be renewed in perpetuity without demanding solid metrics for improvement of service. If you are very fortunate, there will be an entirely single mode fiber-based third-party provider which competes with the previous two mentioned things. Doing what's called and "overbuild" as a new entrant for this is very capital intensive and requires a lot of physical outside plant cabling work and infrastructure at layer 1 in the OSI model. It also requires appropriate cooperation from whichever local entity owns and controls the wood utility poles (again, a political problem).
- gspr 5y agoThis is indeed great, but keep in mind that this story is about one of the well-known greatest: Init7. They're well-known as a for-geeks-by-geeks service. I was massively impressed by them when I lived in CH.
- sschueller 5y agoThe primary reason the cost for init7 is so low is that for example in Zürich city the fiber network is owned by the city (like water pipes and power lines) and paid for by the tax payer. Any provider can provide their service over it. Places outside the city that don't have these kinds of fiber connections aren't this lucky.
- kbenson 5y agoYes and no. Local ISPs in the U.S. are also laying/stringing their own fiber and providing cheap (cheaper than shown here) service. They are starting to move into 10/25 gigabit speeds too, as the costly part (running the fiber) doesn't do much to limit the speed, you just have to update the equipment at each end.
- walrus01 5y agoThere are a number of county sized public utilities districts in Washington state which are doing essentially the same thing. These particular ones are also the last mile electrical grid operator connected to some of the big hydroelectric dams in the region.
- foolmeonce 5y ago> paid for by the tax payer. Actually the Zurich build out was only financed by the tax payer to be done by the electric company and Swisscom. Internet providers must each have equal options to lease the last mile from whoever built it out in a given city or town; it isn't free.
- underscore_ku 5y ago1Gb/s in Romania is 10$/month
- gunapologist99 5y agoI feel the pain. I pay $80/mo for 200Mb/s down. But, still, installing fiber is just expensive. Much more expensive than almost anything else, and requires skill and experience to terminate the connections, and that's even overlooking any regulatory hurdles of digging along the right-of-way, private and public land ownership issues, the costs of the equipment, and the fragility of the fiber itself once installed. None of those costs really scale. In fact, they increase linearly as the pool of available installers decreases, and that's not even talking about the cost of connecting that fiber to anything on the other end.
- m463 5y agoI think I priced it recently and it was $499/mo (+ hidden upcharges) for 1 gig. their lowest price was $65/month for 35/5
- XIVMagnus 5y agoI left comcast for at&t fiber, paying $60/month for 1year. If I learned anything since then is to make sure you attempt to leave and they will start calling you with better offers..all of a sudden lol
- h0nd 5y agoIf you do not live in an area covered by them (which is the majority), it is the same as you say. Situation is not perfect here, either.
- Aeolun 5y agoI just cannot imagine any use case for 25Gbit down/up. I have 2Gbit down/up but for a long while I didn’t bother fixing my cables that limited the speed to 100Mbit because I just couldn’t see the point. The only thing that changed now is that my Steam downloads complete much faster than I expect.