> Never visited the US but I assumed you had the choice of providers, just as most of the rest of the world where internet is available.

Unless you live in a major metro area - where you might, if you're lucky, have two choices of cable provider - there's a reasonable chance you only have a choice between cable, ADSL over some neglected wiring to an exchange a few miles away, and satellite. So if you depend on having fast internet speeds, you're stuck with the one cable provider.

Also - it's not particularly uncommon that an apartment block is wired up for a specific provider and unable to get service from any other provider due to a monopoly contract the building owner signed. Then you also have that happening over entire areas in places, just with local Government signing the contract.

This is crazy. I never realised this. Here in the UK I switch ISPs regularly to take advantage of new customer discounts, cashback incentives etc. I'd never dream of sticking with an ISP longer than I contractually had to.

I'm in the UK too, I just have American friends... and it's a crying shame that they had the opportunity to have the same system as us - when the Bell breakup happened - but instead split up the company geographically.

That's not true. AT&T was broken up around the same time British Telecom was privatized, both in the early 1980s. The difference was that British Telecom had been a government organ (part of the Post Office until 1981), while AT&T had always been a private corporation. When BT was privitized, the government had enormous latitude in imposing conditions on investors purchasing the assets. The U.S. government was not in a similar position. An antitrust violation doesn't give the government the right to just do whatever it wants with the company's assets.

The best course of action on the part of the U.S. likely would've been to permit the AT&T monopoly to continue. AT&T's regulatory treatment at the time permitted it to set prices to ensure a reasonable return on its capital investment. That had the effect of creating an enormous incentive on AT&T's part to invest a lot in its network (the more capital investment, the more profits). As a result, the U.S. telephone system was extremely high quality for its time.

Your second paragraph flies directly in the face of everything that is right about capitalism. As a simple example, long distance call rates dropped by 40-50% after the breakup with no difference in quality.

Capitalism will give you what the market wants, not what a snob would consider "good." E.g. popular music and movies suck, but that's because that's what the market wants. Phone call quality has gone to shit compared to the POTS network of yore, but again the market doesn't care.

Keeping AT&T would've given people what folks on HN want: a wired network that was expensive built gold-plated.

The US tends to have local monopolies; in order to change ISP you need to move house, or maybe state.

This is because the national telco monopoly was broken up early into horizontal companies, rather than the "local loop unbundling" system in the UK (and I think other European countries).

LLU is a little strange because the lines are still owned by one company, so there's no choice of who does the maintenance and installation work (it's always BT OpenReach in the UK). But you do get a choice of what happens to your packets after they reach the DSLAM.

LLU is a regulation to break existing monopolies and allow some degree of competition to happen because an unhealthy internet impedes the country economy.

I'm in utah...maybe it's just different here, but we have Utopia which owns the conduit, and leases out to different ISP's who own the networking equipment. I'm with X-mission who's CEO is a big privacy advocate, and supporter of EFF. But there's google fiber in places, there's x-mission and about 5-6 other utopia-leasing ISP's locally you can choose - and that's just for fiber, you also have Comcast, Qwest(DSL), and CenturyLink, and a few others.

Even in rural Cedar City down south you have about 5 ISP choices. Though the highest speed looks to be TDS at 300MBps

In mass you are lucky if you get 2 options. My building finally got another company to connect after 12+ years of Comcast only. In suburbs around boston you get a mix of Comcast+RCN, Comcast only, Comcast+Verizon, Verizon only.

Ive usually seen 120 MBps/$80 as the max but in my aforementioned building Comcast sent us a friendly email saying we were being upgraded to 200 MBps at the same rate, the day before our building announced the second ISP available at 100 MBps/$69. That smells to me a lot like they always had the capacity, but never turned it on until they finally had competition.

Note: It looks like Comcast has started offering a 2000 MBps connection for 299 a month. Maybe it was just a coincidence that they were adding new capacity at the same time

Bay area here. Its in my lease that I need to use Comcast for any wired internet connection.

I'm so incredibly surprised this hasn't been sued out of existence for anti-competitive behavior. Not that people in the Bay Area ever have more than one choice to begin with for internet service (AT&T and Comcast seem to split the area up amongst themselves).

No. In the US almost always whoever owns the wire that leads to your house also provides your IP transit service. Since there is almost always only one wire, it follows that there is also only one ISP.

My understanding is that there is a cartel of operators in the US. If ISP 1 goes to area A, then ISP 2 will not go to area A and go to area B instead. ISP 1 will then not go to area B.

This is an effective way to maximize profit at little to no cost and is not uncommon in many markets around the world.

They've also convinced your average, market-loving American that there are options and if you don't like your current ISP, you can just switch. I'll switch from Comcast to Wave! Oh wait, Wave just resells Comcast. Ok, I'll switch to AT&T! Sorry, the nearest switch box is more than a mile from your house...your speeds are going to be ~ 400K/s.

Yay, free market.