This is from a small subset of Americans that are always looking for ways to defend large companies and argue against anything that may provide competition to the. It's certainly not the majority; I suspect that it's from employees of these companies that believe the standard company line.
This American, having worked for a small dialup ISP in high school and seeing the dirty tricks telecoms pull, was always with the other Americans that fight the propaganda from large incumbents that carved out geographic chunks of monopolies.
Monthly non-promo rate for gigabit fiber:
Stockholm - Telia - 999 Swedish Krona (~$125)
London - HyperOptic - 60 Pounds (~$80-90)
Zurich - iWay - 79 Swiss Francs (~$80)
New York - Verizon - $80-90.
It's not clear to me that there is much room to go down in countries with similar cost of labor. (Keep in mind that median household income in France is about the same as Choctaw County, Alabama).
The speeds are about 100-120 Mbps download and 30-40 Mbps upload, ping is about 10 ms to google.rs.
Note: I don't work for Vip mobile and don't get paid for this, I just like their service, a lot.
I paid iirc 10$/month for unlimited LTE in Vietnam, can't remember the exact speeds but I remember being surprised at how quick it was.
And what's your point? Are you saying that population density is not correlated with cost of broadband infrastructure per capita because there exists an outlier?
[1] Cell service isn't like an iPhone, where it's made in China wherever you buy it. U.S. cellular providers pay U.S. rents for tower sites and U.S. salaries for the skilled labor to install and maintain them.
Anyway the cheapest list price for unlimited text, talk and data is from Globetel at 22,85€. https://globetel.fi/liittymät
However, nobody pays list prices, there are always specials as the cell phone companies battle each other for market share. The cheapest offer for unlimited and uncapped 4G is currently 2,90€ per month.
What point are you trying to make, other than picking random plans?
I will concede that including discounts make things tricky, even if they are an integral part of the market, but by what measure should MVNOs be overlooked? Unlike in the US, MVNOs in other countries generally have the same access to the network as the MVO service arm.
The fact remains that in Finland you can get a real uncapped and unlimited 4G plan for about twenty bucks. Everything unlimited for under thirty. And capped 4G plans for under ten bucks.
By what measure does the US come even close?
EDIT: for clarification the above prices are all list prices from MVOs, with the exception of the everything unlimited which is from an MVNO. The equivalent MVO plans are a few euro more.
About half way across the city there is some competition, and you can get Gigabit from a couple different providers (for about $100), but the service is really isolated to a few neighborhoods and even companies like AT&T won't even tell you which neighborhoods have the service if you happen to be looking for a house/apartment.
What is silly, is that there are a bunch of fiber providers in texas covering the little towns. For example hill country telephone coop https://www.hctc.net/resources/ (which actually has service maps) has a symetric gigabit plan for $200 in a bunch of towns with populations less than 10k..
Spectrum raised the price (with no notice) to $19.95 a few months ago - a 33% increase for this plan. In fairness, they also raised the speed prior to that around 10%, which of course was heavily advertised. The great thing about ELP, and the reason I switched to it, is I got sick and tired of calling TWC every year to renegotiate my rate. They bumped my 30/5 service from $55/mo to $65/mo, I called 3 months in a row, they said they took care of it, gave me a $10 credit a month or two, but kept billing the new rate. Their final offer was $59.95/mo. I just got sick of talking to them and went to $14.95/mo. The great thing about ELP is that it is a non-promotional rate, so I didn't have to call them anymore.
The hilarious thing is, after I switched to ELP, I got offers every week to upgrade to 30/5 for $49.95/mo, but I didn't care anymore at that point.
3/1 service still allows streaming Netflix and Amazon TV at 720p, though with the recent Net Neutrality neutering, I don't know how long it will be before Spectrum inserts artificial delays to make 3/1 unusable for TV streaming. If they do, I've had it and will switch to reading books for entertainment.
Spectrum's lowest-priced non-promotional service here (Louisville, KY area) is $65/mo. To get $40/mo, you have to bundle with phone or TV, getting you back up over $60/mo. To get $30/mo pricing, you have to bundle with both tv and phone, getting you up to $90/mo. Who wants a landline these days? It's just a pricing gimmick.
You could even do this over the phone most of the time. I would call and tell them the $80 they were charging me was to much that I wanted Internet Basics (or whatever they were calling the deal they had made with the city to offer an extremely inexpensive tier). Frequently they would initially deny such a thing existed, then they would transfer me to someone who would be able to setup the $10 a month plan.
From that point they would make all kinds of incredible offers. They would even send me mailers for basic cable for free if I added home phone service for $12 a month (or some such). 12 Months later they would start to slowly raise the rates (I guess trying to apply the boiling frog theory) and the offers would cease.
Apparently spectrum doesn't want to play these games.
Slightly off topic, but I always work around this by picking an address in the neighborhood and trying to sign up for service.
Universal service is an admirable goal, but the implementation is economically nonsensical. It is, in essence, a tax on telecom service. In the case of the universal service fund, it's an explicit tax. In the case of build-out requirements, it's an implicit tax: instead of taxing an ISP in cash, you're compelling it to provide a service it would not otherwise provide.
But it makes no sense to impose industry-specific taxes on telecom service. It's not like gasoline or alcohol, which warrant taxation to discourage the negative externalities they create. You tax industries that you want to discourage, not ones you want to encourage.
The downside of this economic distortion is that it suppresses competition and entrenches incumbents. There is no "minimal viable product" if you're starting an ISP in Baltimore. There is no sniping away at an incumbents' highest-margin markets. You end up not being allowed to use the tactics that startups in other industries use to take on incumbents.
Contrast how Sweden approaches broadband deployment in rural areas. It simply gives rural residents a tax credit to subsidize construction of a fiber line. It's the same way we approach other forms of welfare. We don't require Whole Foods to build stores in poor neighborhoods. We give direct aid in the form of SNAP and WIC benefits.
US Internet - 1 Gbit for $70/mo or 10 Gbit for $298.00/mo. Coverage is limited to south Minneapolis and a little bit of Edina.
Northstar Fiber - $70/mo. Covers only apartment and condo buildings
Centrylink - $120/mo. Has service around the entire metro, but only in random pockets.
Edit: the reason it costs more for symmetric with some ISPs has very little to do with "cost reasons" and very much to do with market segmentation. It's the same reason math coprocessors used to cost extra, even though it was on every package already. If a small group will be the only users and will pay extra, then make a separate SKU which includes it, call it business/pro/enterprise and charge a premium. It's profit maximizing pure and simple. The super obvious check is that there are ISPs which compete on friendlyness and don't do this. They're not special, they just make less money.
That should be a fair comparison with London and Zurich.
I think there's some reason why it's so cheap, I remember someone explaining, but I don't know what the reason was.
The plan is technically $195 monthly with a ton of “special bonus discounts.” Existing customers aren’t allowed to sign up at all yet, and the price will be higher when they can.
Don't ask PR people sales questions. Call sales, be friendly, you'll get the real price. Call PR or sound like an I-Hate-ISPs jerk, pay the jerk tax.
If you don't want all that there are fiber offers for about $25
Sydney - 90 - $60AUD (~$50) in a country as big as America with 10% of it's population
I stuck with comcast because uverse tv sucks and they took over 3 weeks to get me hooked up when I moved. Comcast was same day hookup. I get 100/10 for about $70.
No data usage caps / overrages though, which I don't think you can get with Bell directly.
Yet the cost is simply shifting to cellular data plans, a market with equally high barriers to entry dominated by even fewer players. Incidentally, the cellular company and broadband company are often one and the same, thanks especially to recent consolidations.
Most of these telecoms realize broadband is a higher cost investment for lower return than cellular. So with their left hand, they’re opening up broadband. But with their right, they’re strengthening their hold on cellular. Really they’re unloading a cost center onto the public, as they attempt to move beyond the past and optimize for the future.
Firstly in general people don't like to be mocked.
"A lot" of comments? Really? By a lot you mean a small handful?
Lastly the idea that Americans especially those who read HN would be even remotely unaware that they were being screwed by their well-known telecom duopoly is patently absurd. I'm pretty sure no HN reader ever needed someone from Europe to tell them they were being "screwed" by Big Telecom.
The US has caught up and surpassed Europe. It is in fact questionable if the US was ever behind, it has had faster speeds than Germany, Italy, Russia, Poland, Spain and France for 20 years. Have you seen how slow average speeds are in countries like France and Italy? They're far behind.
The US average broadband speed is faster than all but five or six small European nations currently. US broadband distribution above 15mbps is also greater than all but a few small European nations.
You're also generalizing to about as great an extreme as you possibly can (Scandinavia is not all of Europe), given how far behind broadband speeds are in the majority of Europe compared to the US.
If the US approach failed so miserably, how come the vast majority of Europe is so slow? Once you get outside of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and Finland, speeds begin to collapse.
There are ~750 million people in the European Union, about ~710 million of those live in nations with slower average speeds and lower broadband distribution than the US.
If we're comparing something more like US states versus small European countries, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and Rhode Island have avg broadband speeds on par with the fastest small countries in Europe.
Countries the US beats on average speeds and 15mbps distribution: France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Greece, Romania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
also
The comments used to range from "the country is just too big, the infrastructure work doesn't compare" to "European broadband infrastructure is paid by the states because of socialist-type taxation".
And finally, after years of municipalities fighting big telco, it is becoming ultra clear that yes Comcast, TWC and co have been screwing the American people for a looooong time.
And hopefully this is only the beginning, prices still have a long way to go!