6 ms·

Why is broadband more expensive in the US?

45 points by Libertatea 13y ago

workhere-io 13y ago
"We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight." This should be a wake-up call for people who believe in the free market's ability to further low prices and good products. In reality it is often up to governments to prevent monopolies from forming and ensure that there is enough competition.
- larrik 13y ago
  A free market for companies that need to tear up every road in your town to lay their own cable is impossible (to say nothing of apartment and office buildings). Internet pricing and business has nothing to do with a free market, and likely never will. Deregulating them was asinine.
  - hga 13y ago
    Bit worse than that, in that the telco monopoly starts at the Federal level. But your point is well taken: claiming the actions of government established monopolies (actually duopolies when you're lucky) are a failure of the free market, and calling on these same governments "to prevent [the] monopolies [they created in the first place] from forming and ensure that there is enough competition" when same governments seem to be entirely happy with the results is ... well, I don't think we live in the same reality. A bit more enlightened a government would at least have drawn a line at what these monopolies can do, i.e. keep them from competing with Netflix et. al., but that would be very problematic with cable companies.
  - dsr_ 13y ago
    http://www.alternet.org/story/148397/how_the_phone_companies_are_screwing_america:_the_$320_billion_broadband_rip-off?page=entire http://www.alternet.org/story/148397/how_the_phone_companies... Or, simply put, the incumbent carriers promised to put fiber to the home in millions of houses in exchange for deregulation; then they didn't fulfill their part of the bargain, because nobody was regulating them.
- cones688 13y ago
  Or control the infrastructure on which it relies. Here in the UK we have a wholesale company (BT OpenReach) which is strictly regulated that provides all telephone lines, providers can then "rent" off those cables. This allows for a massive variety of competition and broadband packages from £5 a month. This also allows a funnel for the govt to invest if required, say laying fibre to remote communities rather than having to rely commercial interests to, who never would.
  - Nux 13y ago
    A massive variety of crap, mostly. The only thing that gets close to well connected countries in Europe is BT's Infinity. The rest are just pathetic ADSL offers or throttled-to-hell cable offers (Virgin, now UPC).
    - dasmoth 13y ago
      Other ISPs have access to BTs FTTC (and, in the few areas it's deployed, FTTP) systems. Not every ISP offers this, but there are plenty of alternatives to BT Infinity.
    - orf 13y ago
      I have a non-bt fiber package and my speeds beat most of my European friends top speeds. In fact it sometimes beats my Hetzner (German) based servers.
      - Nux 13y ago
        Which isp?
        orf 13y ago
        KC Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCOM_Group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCOM_Group)
        Nux 13y ago
- ryanSrich 13y ago
  I think you're confused about the free market. This behavior isn't, in anyway, an example of a free market economy. Local governments collude with large corporations to create these monopolies by subsidizing underground cable to only one or two corporations. http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-just-cable-companies-and-blame-local-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/ http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusin...
- ihsw 13y ago
  This is probably one of the most short-sighted and narrow-minded comments I've seen. The cablecos and telecos have carved America into fiefdoms where the result is neither free nor a market -- it is wholesale feasting on the American populace and our municipal leaders are happily complicit. I could just as easily claim that political corruption is the source of ire, but I would be just as blind.
  - brewdad 13y ago
    Yes. And the reason these fiefdoms exist is because they operate in a largely unregulated market. Companies make these agreements because they are in the company's best interests. Established market leaders don't WANT a free market. They want to set the rules themselves and in today's America they do.
- jseliger 13y ago
  In reality it is often up to governments to prevent monopolies from forming and ensure that there is enough competition. In the U.S. regulatory capture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture) is often the problem, per this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271044 . One reasonable alternative in the U.S. broadband situation is to allow municipalities to build their own networks, but in many states that's already illegal, per the linked comment.
- pdonis 13y ago
  the free market's ability to further low prices and good products The fact that the Federal government de-regulated does not mean the market is free. State and local governments still regulate, not to mention making deals with particular providers, which is why there are so many local monopolies. In a true free market, something like Google Fiber would be deploying much faster than it is.
67726e 13y ago
The link above is more or less blogspam. Here is the full article it links to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24528383 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24528383
rikkus 13y ago
It says that more competition would drive prices down. Is there more competition in Korea, Denmark and The Netherlands? I don't actually know; it'd be interesting to find out!
- skrebbel 13y ago
  In the Netherlands, cable providers are essentially monopolists in their areas. On ADSL and fiber (where that is available), however, there's about 15 competitors or so. So, seems like it does.
  - berryg 13y ago
    Situation in The Netherlands is complex. There is competition between techniques, ADSL, Cable and Fiber. But realistically, ADSL is becoming too slow, fiber is still to expensive. And cable currently hits the sweet spot. But, cable companies are merging and basically there are now only two major companies who are talking with each to merge together. Thus creating an almost monopoly on cable.
batmansbelt 13y ago
Canada is not shown. If memory serves, we'd be worse off than USA. Strange to depict Australia, but not Canada.
- sp332 13y ago
  Canada is between Austria and Hungary on the graph.
- michaelvanham 13y ago
  Canada is four spots above (cheaper) than Australia in the graph.
richbradshaw 13y ago
Glad I live in the UK - that graph shows why our internet is so amazing and so cheap!
- seanalltogether 13y ago
  I wonder which regulations in the UK allow for it to be so cheap. Where I live in Belfast, our only high speed internet option is Virgin, so it might as well be a monopoly as far as we're concerned, and yet we only pay the equivalent of about $30 a month for internet and +200 channels. Maybe part of the tv license fee is going towards infrastructure costs?
exelius 13y ago
No; it has more to do with the way that US cities are very spread out, how right of way must be established on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, and as a distant third the lobbying / political power of the telecoms. Nothing is really stopping new entrants from joining the market -- other than the fact that deploying a broadband network in the US is really, really expensive. In Europe or Asia you can much more easily obtain a license to run cable across a wide area encompassing a whole city; in the US those rights are split between dozens of different municipalities, some of which don't have the resources to approve requests. Additionally, US telecom regulation requires that if you're going to cover a city, you have to cover the WHOLE city; or at least you can't discriminate based on income. This is why Verizon has slowed FiOS deployments to new developments only -- it's a way to be able to only roll FiOS out to wealthy customers. People in the ghetto don't buy broadband, but if you want to roll out in a US city today, you have to make it available to them anyway.
- rayiner 13y ago
  > Additionally, US telecom regulation requires that if you're going to cover a city, you have to cover the WHOLE city; or at least you can't discriminate based on income. This is exactly why negotiations to deploy FiOS broke down in Wilmington, and why Verizon won't deploy to Baltimore. Wilmington demanded that Verizon build out to the whole city, even though almost the whole downtown is too poor to afford fiber.
  - shasta 13y ago
    F'ing poor people...
    - rayiner 13y ago
      There's no free lunch. U.S. cities are geographically the most suitable for deploying things like fiber, but are for historical reasons also much poorer than the surrounding, less dense suburbs. In the U.S., "dense == poor" in a way that is just much less true in Europe. This creates not just an inhospitable geography for telecom providers, but also a very different political climate. American cities are battlegrounds for class issues, as anyone living in San Francisco knows. That makes it very hard to build infrastructure concentrated in the cities. It's not just telecom, look at passenger rail. Amtrak runs a profit in the northeast corridor, but runs at a loss everywhere else because most of the country simply isn't suitable for rail. Yet, it's politically impossible to have an objective of focusing money and effort building a modern high-speed rail network for the northeast, where it makes sense, and abandoning the networks elsewhere.
wil421 13y ago
Some of those countries listed are smaller than the state I live in (area not population). Also, I believe that in the US we have much higher data caps for home internet. My cap is 300GB a month from Communistcast I cant find the reference now but I remember reading about some places in Europe on giving something like 50GB a month. Sure you may have a faster connection but you will blow through your data cap faster.
- Oletros 13y ago
  I don't know any Spanish or Italian broadband ISP that caps the connection
  - wil421 13y ago
    Here is one instance for Germany starting in 2016: http://www.zdnet.com/deutsche-telekom-tweaks-plan-to-bring-in-broadband-data-caps-throttling-in-2016-7000016889/ http://www.zdnet.com/deutsche-telekom-tweaks-plan-to-bring-i... Here is British Telecom: http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10495/~/bt-broadband-usage-policy http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10495/~/bt-br... And finally here is a list on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cable_Internet_providers#Europe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cable_Internet_provider... Thanks for picking two countries that dont have caps. I guess I shouldve been clearer.
sailfast 13y ago
Something I don't see addressed in many of the discussions around broadband (and a question I have) is how infrastructure already in place impacts the cost to provide faster service. Obviously countries that skip the middle steps and go straight to, say, mobile phones without wiring up the country on hard lines have a better capability for less sunk cost. How much is this phenomenon impacting current US broadband? Are we still using crappy cable wiring from the 80s, or are we just being taken to the cleaners because we can? Appreciate anyone that may have more insight or experience taking a crack at the question.
- breischl 13y ago
  We definitely have some problems with old infrastructure, particularly when you're talking about phone lines and DSL. Some houses still have really old lines running to them and even older lines inside them (I swear my previous house had phone cable from the 1940's). Tearing out and replacing all that stuff is quite expensive. This is sometimes called the "last mile problem." [1] On the other hand, mobile phones are not a great analogy. Going straight to mobile allows you to skip digging up all the streets in town, but any sort of wired internet you have to put the wires somewhere. Putting in fiber right off the bat is certainly better, but you still had to do all that digging and installing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile#Existing_delivery_system_problems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile#Existing_delivery_sys...
gdrulia 13y ago
Whenever there is article about internet prices I always see a lot of mistakes in calculations, question is just why? I am Lithuanian, living in London for the last 4 years. When I left Lithuania at 2010, you could have got 100mbps internet with unlimited traffic starting from £25 per month. Now you can get plan for same 100mbps internet for barely £12.5. Plus no contract, no traffic controlling, so you can keep your torrents 7/24. In the mean time in UK, I just last Summer finally got the upgrade to super old-school ~6mbps internet, now speeds reach 60mbps for a price ~£40 per month, and there is a regulation of traffic, so any weekend or evening internet can slow down for torrents. In a nutshell at 2014 this what you get in UK vs Lithuania: BT - UK: 60mbps > £40 > regulated traffic > plus contract 12/24 month. Meganet - LT: 100mbps > £12 > non-regulated traffic > no contract.
rayiner 13y ago
This chart is meaningless for several reasons. 1) It's well-known that U.S. providers achieve closer to advertised speeds than European providers. That's why the U.S. does way better in Akamai's tests of actual bandwidth than the OECD's study involving advertised bandwidth. The U.S. is currently 8th for highest average internet speed in Akamai's most recent state of the internet: http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q313.pdf?WT.mc_id=soti_Q313 http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q313.pdf?WT.mc_i... (see page 13). 2) It's not adjusted for price level in each country. Many things are cheaper in Hungary or Slovenia than the U.S. Internet service isn't a commodity good like an iPhone where everything is assembled in China. Internet infrastructure is put down and maintained by (often unionized) U.S. workers earning U.S. wages, and sold to customers also earning U.S. wages. 3) It ignores the cost of government subsidies: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/the-broadband-gap-why-do-they-have-more-fiber/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/the-broadband-gap-w... ("There are only a handful of major projects worldwide to build fiber lines to homes that don’t involve significant government aid of some sort, Mr. Burstein said, including Verizon’s FiOS and Iliad’s fiber network in some large French cities.").
- rmc 13y ago
  (often unionized) U.S. workers Some of the countries on that list (like France) have considerably more unionization and labour law than the USA
- bestdayever 13y ago
  US ISPs regularly get government subsidies. Hell they took 200 billion to start building fiber in 1996, then they didn't do it.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    First, the $200 billion number is a total fabrication. It was derived by projecting how much more profit telecoms made after deregulation in 1996 than they would have had as tightly-regulated utilities. It's not money actually invested. The states never had that kind of money to invest. Second, to the extent that tax breaks, etc, were handed out, it wasn't combined with the kind of political will you see in European countries or Asian countries. In South Korea, wiring Seoul up with fiber is a politically tractable proposal. In the U.S., wiring New York and Chicago and LA up with fiber is a political non-starter. In the U.S., rural votes count about 2x as much as urban votes, so to the extent that broadband appears on the political radar, it's all about making sure people in rural Kentucky can get DSL, not making sure people in major cities can get fiber.
vixen99 13y ago
Slightly off topic but I wonder why Romania was not included seeing that it's often quoted as having the fastest and cheapest internet in Europe. http://www.bne.eu/story5565/Romania_ranks_first_in_CEECIS_for_internet_speed http://www.bne.eu/story5565/Romania_ranks_first_in_CEECIS_fo...
Fuxy 13y ago
Lol. Wonder why they never bothered to put Romania on this cart. Is it because they have the best prices (1) at the moment? [1] http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink?t=internet-fix&pachet=digi_net_fiberlink_1000 http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink?t=internet... If you were wondering yes 60RON is about £12.
kellros 13y ago
South Africa would have made that chart look totally out of proportion :) I believe 1Mb/s is going for around $35-$60/month
ck2 13y ago
In many US cities, internet is a duopoly, so everyone is squeezed. My ISP raises its price $5/mo every year. I pay $50 for 5mbps with 100GB monthly cap. Five years ago it was half the price. They are making a killing.
crazy1van 13y ago
This article doesn't live up to the title. It is just a chart of prices followed by basically "because monopolies" with nearly no supporting evidence.

45 points by Libertatea 13y ago

"We deregulated high-speed internet access 10 years ago and since then we've seen enormous consolidation and monopolies, so left to their own devices, companies that supply internet access will charge high prices, because they face neither competition nor oversight." This should be a wake-up call for people who believe in the free market's ability to further low prices and good products. In reality it is often up to governments to prevent monopolies from forming and ensure that there is enough competition.

larrik 13y ago
A free market for companies that need to tear up every road in your town to lay their own cable is impossible (to say nothing of apartment and office buildings). Internet pricing and business has nothing to do with a free market, and likely never will. Deregulating them was asinine.
- hga 13y ago
  Bit worse than that, in that the telco monopoly starts at the Federal level. But your point is well taken: claiming the actions of government established monopolies (actually duopolies when you're lucky) are a failure of the free market, and calling on these same governments "to prevent [the] monopolies [they created in the first place] from forming and ensure that there is enough competition" when same governments seem to be entirely happy with the results is ... well, I don't think we live in the same reality. A bit more enlightened a government would at least have drawn a line at what these monopolies can do, i.e. keep them from competing with Netflix et. al., but that would be very problematic with cable companies.
- dsr_ 13y ago
  http://www.alternet.org/story/148397/how_the_phone_companies_are_screwing_america:_the_$320_billion_broadband_rip-off?page=entire http://www.alternet.org/story/148397/how_the_phone_companies... Or, simply put, the incumbent carriers promised to put fiber to the home in millions of houses in exchange for deregulation; then they didn't fulfill their part of the bargain, because nobody was regulating them.
cones688 13y ago
Or control the infrastructure on which it relies. Here in the UK we have a wholesale company (BT OpenReach) which is strictly regulated that provides all telephone lines, providers can then "rent" off those cables. This allows for a massive variety of competition and broadband packages from £5 a month. This also allows a funnel for the govt to invest if required, say laying fibre to remote communities rather than having to rely commercial interests to, who never would.
- Nux 13y ago
  A massive variety of crap, mostly. The only thing that gets close to well connected countries in Europe is BT's Infinity. The rest are just pathetic ADSL offers or throttled-to-hell cable offers (Virgin, now UPC).
  - dasmoth 13y ago
    Other ISPs have access to BTs FTTC (and, in the few areas it's deployed, FTTP) systems. Not every ISP offers this, but there are plenty of alternatives to BT Infinity.
  - orf 13y ago
    I have a non-bt fiber package and my speeds beat most of my European friends top speeds. In fact it sometimes beats my Hetzner (German) based servers.
    - Nux 13y ago
      Which isp?
      - orf 13y ago
        KC Internet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCOM_Group http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KCOM_Group)
        Nux 13y ago
ryanSrich 13y ago
I think you're confused about the free market. This behavior isn't, in anyway, an example of a free market economy. Local governments collude with large corporations to create these monopolies by subsidizing underground cable to only one or two corporations. http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-just-cable-companies-and-blame-local-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/ http://www.wired.com/opinion/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusin...
ihsw 13y ago
This is probably one of the most short-sighted and narrow-minded comments I've seen. The cablecos and telecos have carved America into fiefdoms where the result is neither free nor a market -- it is wholesale feasting on the American populace and our municipal leaders are happily complicit. I could just as easily claim that political corruption is the source of ire, but I would be just as blind.
- brewdad 13y ago
  Yes. And the reason these fiefdoms exist is because they operate in a largely unregulated market. Companies make these agreements because they are in the company's best interests. Established market leaders don't WANT a free market. They want to set the rules themselves and in today's America they do.
jseliger 13y ago
In reality it is often up to governments to prevent monopolies from forming and ensure that there is enough competition. In the U.S. regulatory capture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture) is often the problem, per this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7271044 . One reasonable alternative in the U.S. broadband situation is to allow municipalities to build their own networks, but in many states that's already illegal, per the linked comment.
pdonis 13y ago
the free market's ability to further low prices and good products The fact that the Federal government de-regulated does not mean the market is free. State and local governments still regulate, not to mention making deals with particular providers, which is why there are so many local monopolies. In a true free market, something like Google Fiber would be deploying much faster than it is.

67726e 13y ago

The link above is more or less blogspam. Here is the full article it links to: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24528383 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24528383

rikkus 13y ago

It says that more competition would drive prices down. Is there more competition in Korea, Denmark and The Netherlands? I don't actually know; it'd be interesting to find out!

skrebbel 13y ago
In the Netherlands, cable providers are essentially monopolists in their areas. On ADSL and fiber (where that is available), however, there's about 15 competitors or so. So, seems like it does.
- berryg 13y ago
  Situation in The Netherlands is complex. There is competition between techniques, ADSL, Cable and Fiber. But realistically, ADSL is becoming too slow, fiber is still to expensive. And cable currently hits the sweet spot. But, cable companies are merging and basically there are now only two major companies who are talking with each to merge together. Thus creating an almost monopoly on cable.

batmansbelt 13y ago

Canada is not shown. If memory serves, we'd be worse off than USA. Strange to depict Australia, but not Canada.

sp332 13y ago
Canada is between Austria and Hungary on the graph.
michaelvanham 13y ago
Canada is four spots above (cheaper) than Australia in the graph.

richbradshaw 13y ago

Glad I live in the UK - that graph shows why our internet is so amazing and so cheap!

seanalltogether 13y ago
I wonder which regulations in the UK allow for it to be so cheap. Where I live in Belfast, our only high speed internet option is Virgin, so it might as well be a monopoly as far as we're concerned, and yet we only pay the equivalent of about $30 a month for internet and +200 channels. Maybe part of the tv license fee is going towards infrastructure costs?

exelius 13y ago

No; it has more to do with the way that US cities are very spread out, how right of way must be established on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis, and as a distant third the lobbying / political power of the telecoms. Nothing is really stopping new entrants from joining the market -- other than the fact that deploying a broadband network in the US is really, really expensive. In Europe or Asia you can much more easily obtain a license to run cable across a wide area encompassing a whole city; in the US those rights are split between dozens of different municipalities, some of which don't have the resources to approve requests. Additionally, US telecom regulation requires that if you're going to cover a city, you have to cover the WHOLE city; or at least you can't discriminate based on income. This is why Verizon has slowed FiOS deployments to new developments only -- it's a way to be able to only roll FiOS out to wealthy customers. People in the ghetto don't buy broadband, but if you want to roll out in a US city today, you have to make it available to them anyway.

rayiner 13y ago
> Additionally, US telecom regulation requires that if you're going to cover a city, you have to cover the WHOLE city; or at least you can't discriminate based on income. This is exactly why negotiations to deploy FiOS broke down in Wilmington, and why Verizon won't deploy to Baltimore. Wilmington demanded that Verizon build out to the whole city, even though almost the whole downtown is too poor to afford fiber.
- shasta 13y ago
  F'ing poor people...
  - rayiner 13y ago
    There's no free lunch. U.S. cities are geographically the most suitable for deploying things like fiber, but are for historical reasons also much poorer than the surrounding, less dense suburbs. In the U.S., "dense == poor" in a way that is just much less true in Europe. This creates not just an inhospitable geography for telecom providers, but also a very different political climate. American cities are battlegrounds for class issues, as anyone living in San Francisco knows. That makes it very hard to build infrastructure concentrated in the cities. It's not just telecom, look at passenger rail. Amtrak runs a profit in the northeast corridor, but runs at a loss everywhere else because most of the country simply isn't suitable for rail. Yet, it's politically impossible to have an objective of focusing money and effort building a modern high-speed rail network for the northeast, where it makes sense, and abandoning the networks elsewhere.

wil421 13y ago

Some of those countries listed are smaller than the state I live in (area not population). Also, I believe that in the US we have much higher data caps for home internet. My cap is 300GB a month from Communistcast I cant find the reference now but I remember reading about some places in Europe on giving something like 50GB a month. Sure you may have a faster connection but you will blow through your data cap faster.

Oletros 13y ago
I don't know any Spanish or Italian broadband ISP that caps the connection
- wil421 13y ago
  Here is one instance for Germany starting in 2016: http://www.zdnet.com/deutsche-telekom-tweaks-plan-to-bring-in-broadband-data-caps-throttling-in-2016-7000016889/ http://www.zdnet.com/deutsche-telekom-tweaks-plan-to-bring-i... Here is British Telecom: http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10495/~/bt-broadband-usage-policy http://bt.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/10495/~/bt-br... And finally here is a list on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cable_Internet_providers#Europe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cable_Internet_provider... Thanks for picking two countries that dont have caps. I guess I shouldve been clearer.

sailfast 13y ago

Something I don't see addressed in many of the discussions around broadband (and a question I have) is how infrastructure already in place impacts the cost to provide faster service. Obviously countries that skip the middle steps and go straight to, say, mobile phones without wiring up the country on hard lines have a better capability for less sunk cost. How much is this phenomenon impacting current US broadband? Are we still using crappy cable wiring from the 80s, or are we just being taken to the cleaners because we can? Appreciate anyone that may have more insight or experience taking a crack at the question.

breischl 13y ago
We definitely have some problems with old infrastructure, particularly when you're talking about phone lines and DSL. Some houses still have really old lines running to them and even older lines inside them (I swear my previous house had phone cable from the 1940's). Tearing out and replacing all that stuff is quite expensive. This is sometimes called the "last mile problem." [1] On the other hand, mobile phones are not a great analogy. Going straight to mobile allows you to skip digging up all the streets in town, but any sort of wired internet you have to put the wires somewhere. Putting in fiber right off the bat is certainly better, but you still had to do all that digging and installing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile#Existing_delivery_system_problems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile#Existing_delivery_sys...

gdrulia 13y ago

Whenever there is article about internet prices I always see a lot of mistakes in calculations, question is just why? I am Lithuanian, living in London for the last 4 years. When I left Lithuania at 2010, you could have got 100mbps internet with unlimited traffic starting from £25 per month. Now you can get plan for same 100mbps internet for barely £12.5. Plus no contract, no traffic controlling, so you can keep your torrents 7/24. In the mean time in UK, I just last Summer finally got the upgrade to super old-school ~6mbps internet, now speeds reach 60mbps for a price ~£40 per month, and there is a regulation of traffic, so any weekend or evening internet can slow down for torrents. In a nutshell at 2014 this what you get in UK vs Lithuania: BT - UK: 60mbps > £40 > regulated traffic > plus contract 12/24 month. Meganet - LT: 100mbps > £12 > non-regulated traffic > no contract.

rayiner 13y ago

This chart is meaningless for several reasons. 1) It's well-known that U.S. providers achieve closer to advertised speeds than European providers. That's why the U.S. does way better in Akamai's tests of actual bandwidth than the OECD's study involving advertised bandwidth. The U.S. is currently 8th for highest average internet speed in Akamai's most recent state of the internet: http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q313.pdf?WT.mc_id=soti_Q313 http://www.akamai.com/dl/akamai/akamai-soti-q313.pdf?WT.mc_i... (see page 13). 2) It's not adjusted for price level in each country. Many things are cheaper in Hungary or Slovenia than the U.S. Internet service isn't a commodity good like an iPhone where everything is assembled in China. Internet infrastructure is put down and maintained by (often unionized) U.S. workers earning U.S. wages, and sold to customers also earning U.S. wages. 3) It ignores the cost of government subsidies: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/the-broadband-gap-why-do-they-have-more-fiber/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0 http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/the-broadband-gap-w... ("There are only a handful of major projects worldwide to build fiber lines to homes that don’t involve significant government aid of some sort, Mr. Burstein said, including Verizon’s FiOS and Iliad’s fiber network in some large French cities.").

rmc 13y ago
(often unionized) U.S. workers Some of the countries on that list (like France) have considerably more unionization and labour law than the USA
bestdayever 13y ago
US ISPs regularly get government subsidies. Hell they took 200 billion to start building fiber in 1996, then they didn't do it.
- rayiner 13y ago
  First, the $200 billion number is a total fabrication. It was derived by projecting how much more profit telecoms made after deregulation in 1996 than they would have had as tightly-regulated utilities. It's not money actually invested. The states never had that kind of money to invest. Second, to the extent that tax breaks, etc, were handed out, it wasn't combined with the kind of political will you see in European countries or Asian countries. In South Korea, wiring Seoul up with fiber is a politically tractable proposal. In the U.S., wiring New York and Chicago and LA up with fiber is a political non-starter. In the U.S., rural votes count about 2x as much as urban votes, so to the extent that broadband appears on the political radar, it's all about making sure people in rural Kentucky can get DSL, not making sure people in major cities can get fiber.

vixen99 13y ago

Slightly off topic but I wonder why Romania was not included seeing that it's often quoted as having the fastest and cheapest internet in Europe. http://www.bne.eu/story5565/Romania_ranks_first_in_CEECIS_for_internet_speed http://www.bne.eu/story5565/Romania_ranks_first_in_CEECIS_fo...

Fuxy 13y ago

Lol. Wonder why they never bothered to put Romania on this cart. Is it because they have the best prices (1) at the moment? [1] http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink?t=internet-fix&pachet=digi_net_fiberlink_1000 http://www.rcs-rds.ro/internet-digi-net/fiberlink?t=internet... If you were wondering yes 60RON is about £12.

kellros 13y ago

South Africa would have made that chart look totally out of proportion :) I believe 1Mb/s is going for around $35-$60/month

ck2 13y ago

In many US cities, internet is a duopoly, so everyone is squeezed. My ISP raises its price $5/mo every year. I pay $50 for 5mbps with 100GB monthly cap. Five years ago it was half the price. They are making a killing.

crazy1van 13y ago

This article doesn't live up to the title. It is just a chart of prices followed by basically "because monopolies" with nearly no supporting evidence.