Eastern Europe, Bulgaria in particular. I've always attributed it to lax copyright laws (or at least lax application of said laws) and low average income, but n

Eastern Europe, Bulgaria in particular. I've always attributed it to lax copyright laws (or at least lax application of said laws) and low average income, but not so low that you can't afford to buy a PC and pay it off over a few months, resulting in rampant file sharing driving high demand for fast, unmetered internet access. For a while in the early 00s each ISP ran their own file sharing site even. It also helps that you can just string cables between buildings tying them to lampposts and trees. "Can" meaning that it's against all regulations and kind of unsafe in a thunderstorm (one friend had his NIC fried once, fun times), but people don't complain - you can either have internet that you have to unplug when it rains or no internet at all because running cables and obeying the building code gets too pricey for lean ISP startups. Today of course most cables are underground and smaller ISPs have merged or were bought by larger telecommunications operators. Also if you want internet access on your mobile phone, be prepared to get robbed in plain sight - GSM operators here operate just like everywhere else. In the end, the actual pushing of bits around doesn't really cost anything. Just some small amount of electricity. The actual costs to an ISP are all infrastructure and maintenance of the infrastructure. It's not hard to get some money to buy routers and enough bandwidth to service a neighbourhood, then work your ass off as a sysadmin keeping everything running. The hard part is the cables. You have to run your own Ethernet and optics and anything that gets in the way of you running it drives cost up and makes it ever so harder to get into business. In conclusion, lax building code laws and high consumer demand allowed our ISPs to start out with a minimal investment and upgrade their infrastructure as they went along to make it more and more reliable and safe. Today I'd say the price for access is as low as it can go, the service is pretty solid, with 8-10megabit speeds at the lowest and everybody gets given a static non-NAT IPv4 address for something like 15$/month.