In many areas of the country, the cable companies basically have localized monopolies on high speed internet. They claim they have competition in DSL and satellite (!!!) but these technologies just can't compete on speed in this day and age, leaving cable as the only viable alternative. From what I gather, this is one of the reasons why Google started Google Fiber.

Interesting. Over here, providers are offering VDSL2, advertised as 100/100Mbit. Given my experience with DSL, that probably means about half that for the average user who is 2-3km from the DSLAM box. That's still pretty respectable. Is noone offering modern DSL in the US?

Nope, sadly not. Even in San Francisco (which is pretty sad for being the heart of tech) it is cable or legacy DSL. If you are at a building that has an exclusivity agreement with AT&T, you might even end up paying them $50+ a month for 28mbit fiber. (yes, fiber terminates at my door but that's the max speed they offer)

Well, there is Webpass for some in SF. I pay $60/mo for 100mbits up & down, and some buildings go up to 500mbits. No contracts, and I just hook up to an ethernet jack in my apartment. It is a local startup that is expanding elsewhere.

Webpass is the best Internet service ever. I signed up as soon as our building got it, it was $50/mo then for the 100Mbs. Definitely worth it if you have the opportunity to live in a building that has it. Really straightforward website, billing, and setup. It looks like they're expanding to some other cities. I wish them luck.

Yep, webpass is greatest thing ever.. and there's also sonic.net and paxio.com and gowaveg.com depending on where you are too.

I love WebPass, and I used them exclusively in my previous apartment but this new building has this silly exclusivity agreement and Comcast can't make installations on this building as they somehow managed to make this residential building show up as a business address on Comcast's website.

I could get Sonic Fusion FTTN but that's just rebranded AT&T, and peaks at 28mbits. I get better LTE speeds than that.

I tried to bring in MonkeyBrains but the building administration refused, saying they would have to drill into load-bearing columns. Just an excuse.

To be fair, there is sonic does offer vdsl2 in many parts of the city, over 100Mbit down, albeit a bit less up. There's also webpass for larger buildings which offers almost a gigabit during non-peak times. So SF isn't as dire as you make it sound, though I agree it's behind many other cities.

What?! In Cincinnati I had CincyBell Fibre about three years ago. I think I paid around $60 ~ $70. I don't remember the advertised speed, but it was crazy super fast.

It varies. If you are in an area with actual competition, they try harder. Where I live, it's crappy TWC 20/5 or so for $60 a month, or a selection of DSL providers offering everything from 5/1 to 0.5 megabits per second for around $20 a month. Seriously, there is an ISP offering a 0.5 Mbps DSL for $20 a month, oh, and it bursts to 1 Mbps...

VDSL2+, which is rolling out next year, is even supposed to handle 500/200 – in some areas T-Online has been testing it, and supposedly it works (but it means you have to be less than 100m from the box).

I stay with Comcast because it is way cheaper then AT&T but with AT&T's VDSL I could get 45mbps (fiber to the neighborhood box, apparently).

I live in a small town in Georgia and literally my only internet access options are Comcast and AT&T. AT&T's service here is fairly slow compared to Comcast's offerings, and since I work from home remote for a company based in Florida I have to choose the fastest options available to me, and that's Comcast. I would love to have more options, but I just don't.

I only pay for internet access, I don't use their cable TV or telephone offerings. Internet alone is about $80/month. I just ran a speed test and I get 14.1Mbps down & 8.6Mbps up. I forget which speed tier I'm paying for, but I know I'm paying for much more than that! Ugh...

Same thing in my big town -- Chicago. Some parts of Chicago you get RCN competing, which is amazing. They have 100mb plans for $40 a month. But for most people, myself included, you pay $80/mo for "50mb" internet that really runs at about 20mb 80% of the time, 2-3mb 15% of the time, and totally not working at all 5% of the time.

Fellow Chicagoan here: In the suburbs the options are fewer, but the functional speeds are better - at least for Comcast delivered over coax. I get an average of about 120/15 for $80/mo at home and about the same speed at our suburban office for roughly double that price (business class).

AT&T DSL sucks no matter where you are though.

Also in Chicago, RCN was amazing. Now stuck in Comcast hell since they're not over in Logan Square. And the service starts shitting out every night around 7:30pm. Assuming they don't have enough cards in the box on the block.

In my different area of that small town, I pay $40 for 75 mbit, that actually gives me 95mbit (even at 7:00pm). And is rock solid. I don't mean to sound like a shill but I think "most people" is an incredible stretch.

Yeah, you're totally right. I just went to Comcast's website and it seems like we're basically just getting shafted. I wonder if they adjusted their prices now that RCN is selling 105mbps internet for ~$40-50/mo

Get their business plan. I always get exactly my paid for rate, and they claim business plan speeds are the same everywhere they provide service. you save money on land living in a small town, spend some of the savings on bandwidth... Or expense it to your company. Cheaper than office space in florida. Or try calling them, maybe there is a configuration issue with the router. What is the advertised rate ? You should be getting that speed.

You're a bit naive there. Business plans are not magical in any way. In fact, the past week we seem to be having a lot more issues with our business plan on Comcast than I am with my personal plan at home which seems to drop the connection roughly every other hour.

Still, Comcast shares their internet between customers in your area. If you're the only customer in your area, you can certainly get what you're paying for. If you're not, the best you can hope for is 1/4 of your promised connection speed during peak hours. It is something that Comcast has been doing for years, but it allows them to advertise higher speeds for lower prices than AT&T and people believe them because not everyone is familiar with the fine print.

Advantages of the business plan:

- I can usually get directly to someone clued on the phone, who doesn't make me jump through hoops or silly scripts to debug a problem; they realize I've already done everything possible on my end already before calling (spent years working for ISPs).

- No blocked ports, I host my own server and do my own email, web hosting, etc. Comcast even provides reverse dns for my five static IPs.

- No data caps. In fact, they don't even measure usage for business accounts.

Other than when I had a physical problem (short in the line from the pole to my house), I've always gotten the speeds that I pay for - in this case 50Mbps down, 10Mbps up.

Disadvantages to business class:

- I pay $150/month for 50/10 and five statics.

- It's Comcast.

I was an ATT UVerse customer (standard, not business) before switching to Comcast Business about 4-5 years ago, but their max speed offering was only around 18Mbps down, and their "business class" service required the same craptastic 2Wire gateway and static IPs required 1-to-1 NAT through that gateway... No thanks.

While I have no direct experience with the business side of Comcast business customer support, I noted that when we reported an issue yesterday at work, it took them over 6 hours to fix it at which point they might as well not have bothered. The operating hours were over.

- Don't care about blocked ports. I don't personally host anything, our company also has a separate hosting service. - I'm sorry, but... data caps? Is this a joke? In this day and age of services like Netflix and digital content distribution like Steam there's a place for data caps?

- $150/month is a ridiculous cost to put on a guaranteed 50/10 line. Don't care about the static IPs personally as I don't host anything. - Comcast, right.... you hit it on the nail there, it looks like. My experience with their customer service so far has been horrible. I'm usually empathetic when talking with technical support as I used to do the same job myself, but there's empathy and then there's people trying to intentionally annoy. So far I've felt like bashing my head against the wall after just three sentences from Comcast tech support. And they claim they spend millions on customer satisfaction? Please.

I was an UVerse customer too. I had only one issue with them for the two years I was their customer and I'm seriously considering going back. Better have a slower connection I can rely on than having a 'blazing fast' connection that craps out every 5 minutes.

My post meant that the business class service has no data caps or measuring of use, versus the "consumer" level Comcast service.

ATT business plan here... I have no issues only 20Mbit down and 2Mbit up but when I call customer service I have someone on site to fix things in 3 hrs or less

I wont ever use Comcast again... I had to get the local govt involved to get them to stop billing me for a place I hadnt lived in for 6 months. ( yes there is an agency here to deal with them they are that shitty )

The smaller speed with usable internet speeds and decent customer service is worth it.

Yeah, I'm definitely reconsidering ATT. I have coworkers that swear by Comcast and how great they are but my experience has been flaky at best. I work from home regularly, so I need my connection to be stable. I also do a fair bit of online gaming which also requires a stable connection.

It kind of tends to hurt not just me, but a fair bit of other people in the process when I, as a raid leader for our guild, cannot maintain a stable connection and get dropped several times over a 2-hour period. Never had those issues on my ATT connection and I've only had a single issue where a tree had fallen and severed a cable during 2 years of being their customer.

I wanted to start streaming our raids which was also the main reason to try the switch, but if it comes at the cost of being unable to take part in them, I might as well not bother.

Similar experience: our older house had AT&T - only 7.5 Mbit/s or so, but it pretty much never went down; our newer house has Comcast - supposed to be 30 Mbit/s, but often goes wonky or out.

It's a tough call: go 1/4 speed at 1/2 the price, reliably, or try to go 4 times faster at "only" twice the price (appx), but gamble from day to day :-(

Good to have another data point. I have not had issues in a year. I routinely download at 10 megabytes per second reading ct scans. If I wasnt getting what I was paying for, I would cancel the service and drive into work to read my cases. I am in a residential non techy area, I don't know if that helps.

I'm sorry, that sounds brutal. I live in Brooklyn and thankfully there is competition from TWC, RCN and Fios here. I have TWC cable at 300 megs down and about 50 up for about $60 a month. The cable television is still horrible and an enormous rip off.

God, I pay that much for a 20/5 from TWC...

I live in a large town (Boston) and the situation is not much different.

If you're in Boston proper, you can get NetBlazr: http://netblazr.com/ (wireless mesh network)

Unfortunately they don't even reach JP, so I'm stuck with Comcast.

What are your options for satellite internet? The pricing these days seems very competitive, and although latency is (much) higher it should be ideal for the vast majority of use cases.

Latency is pretty important for browsing the web. No matter how much bandwidth you have, making every request take two round-trips to geosync is going to make the connection feel very slow.

If low Earth orbit broadband internet ever happens, that could potentially be an excellent choice. But with the current offerings, it's always going to be the absolute last resort.

It looks like they charge the same price for ~1/10 the speed and 1/20 the transfer (Does Comcast still have a 300 GB limit? That compares favorably to 10.)

Nobody really wants to be a Comcast customer. Comcast thrives because they're mostly the only choice or the less bad choice of two.

I was a "happy" Comcast customer for years. I was in a condo where the choices were Comcast or Verizon DSL. Maybe. I called Verizon to see what they had to offer and they didn't know if I could get their DSL service or not. The best they could do was to place an order and see if it worked. Really!

Even if I could get service from them, their offer was 1.5Mbps for something like $50/month. Completely ridiculous.

It was like this when I moved out about three years ago, and as far as I know it's still like that today.

I wouldn't say there's no competition per se, but some areas are limited based on who has lines out there. For example, the area I live in at Augusta only offers Wow! as a cable provider; over priced reseller. But, I was fortunate enough to land a decent contract- more channels than Wow! and for 1/4 the price- with Dish. Satellite vs. Cable, but I'm willing to take that trade off for a better price point. Plus there's always NetFlix/Hulu.

To give you an idea, my internet options are in my area:

-Comcast (up to 100MB/s)

-Century Link DSL (up to 10MB/s)

-3G/4G modem (up to like 3MB/s)

Then 10 minutes south of where I live, that county has deals with a local ISP who behaves exactly like Comcast, but with terrible pricing and lower caps. Also no realistic alternatives.

While I could stomach the speeds of DSL (with some effort), I can't stomach the price. I'd end up paying just as much as comcast for much lower speeds. I really don't have a choice.

edit MB, not mb

Yes. Many markets have literally one option. My options for internet are comcast, or satellite probably? So really my only high speed option is comcast. I don't even think I can get DSL. I think a lot of markets the monopoly is even being protected by law.

It's like that in a lot of places. I live in extremely central Berlin and cannot find a provider that can deliver above 25mbps for less than hundreds per month.

It is a real shame that anything over 5-7mbps is considered "fast enough" by the vast majority of consumers.

Not across the entire US, but in many places there are few or zero practical competitors.

And where there are competitors, they're most likely AT&T or Time-Warner, which have similar shitty practices.

That's my understanding. (No competition that does it any better.)

The only reason I currently use Comcast, is my choices are ATT DSL at 6 mbps, or Comcast.

Not that I like ATT, but when (coming in the next 6 months) they roll out faster service, I will be happy to switch.

Don't like ATT either, but at least their service seems to be much more stable. I haven't had to speak with an AT&T customer support rep in over a year. Comcast, I've been doing their trial service run for two weeks now and I've already had to deal with their customer support 6+ times, 2 of which were during the installation. I think I'll probably just end up canceling before my month is up and going back to ATT. At least I knew I could rely on my connection to not crap out at random.

Where I am located, it is CenturyLink or Comcast. Neither are any good. AT&T is in the "area", but not MY area.

So, that would be 3 bad choices.