We pay $300/mo for 35/5 TWC Business Class in West LA. It's a complete rip off, but there are few other options. Verizon DSL is available up to 5Mbps, or we could hard wire a T1 for $1k/month.

I'm optimistic about Google Fiber but I'll believe it when I see it.

This is so ridiculous, it's literally unbelievable. My home city, Kiev(Ukraine), has multiple 1 Gbit residential broadband providers for $6 - $15. Not joking.

As I learned in New Zealand, the data rate to the ISP is largely irrelevant. I had a 100mbps+ connection in NZ, but rarely got over 2mbps to any international location. It would speedtest at full line rate.

However, here in the US, I've got a 50mbps connection, and I regularly get 50mbps.

US broadband interconnects with the rest of the network are pretty terrible.

Reference: those name-and-shame articles a while back from a network company (Level 3, from memory?) that produced hard numbers on how little $ US cable/DSL internet companies were willing to put into improving their capacity at the peer link.

[Edit] Yup, Level 3. I thought they were interesting because hard numbers at this level seem difficult to come by. Here are the articles from 2014:

http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/chicken-game-played-chi...

http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-internet-m...

These are mostly real international data transfer rates, at least for torrents/CDN servers/S3.

Average salary in Kiev is also, what, 400 Euros per month? With LA's (generously median) 3000 Euros per month that turns out to be the same (if 15$ is taken into account). Vast difference is in speed. So, what's up LA?

Ukraine and Romania successfully avoided Deutsche Telekom monopoly.

Thank you brave Soviet soldiers of the Great Patriotic War.

this is for 'business class' service, which is often in office buildings. metro fiber and ethernet is really, really, really expensive in these buildings because of other monopoly factors - the cable companies wish they could compete here, but they sometimes can't.

for example, symmetrical 10mbps metro ethernet is close to $2k/month here in LA. yes, for real.

commercial service has higher SLA's (which really doesn't mean a damn thing, it's just tradition) and is more expensive.

it's highly dependent on your office building's location. cable companies and fiber operators do not canvas entire commercial districts like they do residential areas.

ISP competition in Kiev is intense. Business rates for symmetrical ethernet are around $50-200/month for 100 Mbit and $300-500/month for 1Gbit eth/fiber. Monopoly sucks.

Most of the cost of deploying fiber is labor, and that costs 5-10x more in the U.S. Also, eastern European countries see fast Internet as a competitive advantage. American cities don't see the need.

I bet in Kiev, a fiber provider wanting to lay fiber wouldn't be turned down for not agreeing to wife up the poor neighborhoods that couldn't afford it any way. That's what happens here.

Right, that's why Netherlands, Sweden and South Korea have similarly slow data transfer rates and high prices as US. /s

Also most high speed connections in Kiev are not fiber but ethernet cables.

Broadband deployment in the U.S. is almost entirely a matter of state and municipal-level rather than national-level policies. For example, Virginia, where my parents live, has significantly faster average speeds than either Sweden or the Netherlands: http://www.amic.media/media/files/file_352_841.pdf (see pp. 18, 32).

the truth can't be literally unbelievable by definition.

My least favorite aspect of these stories has to be all the people who like to list out the price of internet connectivity as if it lives in a vacuum. It's not really a meaningful datapoint on its own for a number of reasons, and the conversation it engenders is almost never worth reading.

> the truth can't be literally unbelievable by definition.

Why? How does the truth of a story have any bearing on its believability.

(Eg some people are literally unable to believe some scientific facts.)

I should move to Ukraine. Need a roommate?!

Ukraine is insanely cheap for digital nomads. $2000/month will get you a very high quality of life, including a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment in a city center, great food from restaurants, adequate access to modern healthcare and diverse nightlife/culture venues.

I feel your pain. TWC business class is the scam of the century. TWC really has colluded the market here. In our current office, we basically have no choice: TWC or Verizon DSL at 3Mbps for $100+ per month. What is this? 1997?

Their service from what I hear is shoddy, crappy customer service and of course they really take you for what's it worth when it comes to the bandwidth / cost ratio -- because they can apparently.

A great solution is to grab a T-Mobile LTE Hotspot for $110 / month (21GB max data limit unfortunately) but you're getting 60-80Mbps downstream. It's solid. Rig it to a router and spread the WAN signal to your LAN.

So literally 300 seconds worth of internet for $100/month?

edit: B b blah. 2,400 seconds.

You're off by a factor of 8, bandwidth is typically measured in bits per second while data is typically measured in bytes. Also, saying that they only have DATA_CAP / BANDWIDTH amount of time to use the internet is disingenuous at best, the only time that you're using 100% of the available bandwidth for any sustained amount of time is when downloading a large file. 21 GBs isn't a ton of data but that can easily last someone a month if they're just using it for web browsing for business purposes only. Online backup is out of the question but for just email and web browsing that data cap isn't too big of a deal.

I think that's 21GBytes / month @ 70Mbps = 2,400 seconds.

Honestly, if your options are share a 3Mbit connection with a few people or have a fast connection limited to 21Gbytes / month I could see paying for that out of pocket.

I had to do something similar. I have 25Mbps/Mbps DSL where I live for $70/mo. If I wanted to upload a file for work (10-20GB), I would have to drive to my office about an hour away. I recently found a co-work location that is 15 mins. away so I go there when I need to.

It is sad that I have no other hard line option other than DSL in my area. Satellite and Verizon Wireless for home are other nonfeasable options available.

I've got the 20/200 package as well and I can consistently max the connection on both speedtests as well as actual downloading. No beefs with TW's service here.

You have your numbers mixed up....It actually does make a difference

Strange—in New York I pay TWC $83 a month for 300/30.

Edit: 300/20

Consumer service in LA is pretty good, around $90 for 200/20 in most areas. It's TWC Business Class that's a horrible rip off.

New York is a lot more dense, it doesn't surprise me too much that the prices would be different.

Are you sure it isn't 300/20?

(also you have a pretty good deal - I have 200/20 for $80)

We are right in the center of Midtown NYC and TWC business class is $350 for 100/10. Other option is Verizon DSL at $90!