I feel like this is some form of Stockholm Syndrome. You shouldn't pay more. You should be getting better speeds for the same or lesser price. Technology is advancing and the carriers are purposely holding us back, for exactly the reason you gave.

If ADSL is cheap I actually would prefer to have it for redundancy. Phone line and cable is generally the only lines that are routed to a home that can be used for Internet.

Deploying fiber is expensive. He’s going to have to pay for it—AT&T isn’t a charity.

You sure? We tax payers have given it $Billions and AT&T hasn’t met its obligations for that money. I bet if one were to trace it, it was funneled to rich shareholders.

ISPs should lay out an expensive fibre network (so expensive that Google Fiber had to give up on it) and I should pay less money? That's just crazy.

Why? We already paid them $400 billion dollars to get you decent Internet access (see: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-book-of-broken-promis_b_5...). I think that gives us the right to expect you to have something better than 14Mbps DSL at a decent price.

> so expensive that Google Fiber had to give up on it

Part of that cost comes from ATT and Comcast using their government sugar daddy to make running fiber as expensive and difficult as possible.

Example: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/01/att-and-comcast-...

Absolutely! Even ignoring all the stimulus money and tax breaks probably given, municipalities all over the US are building out their own fiber that is blowing the others away in performance and even price usually.

Who said anything about you having to pay more? At least here, in the market that I can choose between FTTH and ADSL1 from the same provider, there's a 990 Mbps difference for the _same price_.

Though - my personal opinion is that old copper that no one really wants to maintain is wasted space for cabling that could support significantly higher bandwidth at lower latency. Telcos are already refusing to replace destroyed landlines and instead substituing LTE service or otherwise instead for a decade now.

It shouldn't be more. Heck, your local tax dollars probably paid to lay the cables anyway. It should probably be 1/4th of what you're paying

ISPs don’t make 75% profit margins, so that’s really not possible.

> ISPs don’t make 75% profit margins, so that’s really not possible.

You're assuming the only place price reductions can come from is lower profits and there is no room to e.g. reduce waste or increase efficiency, which monopoly providers have a long tradition of not even attempting to do. Which usually means there is a lot of low-hanging fruit there.

Profit is a matter of accounting. The telcos specifically are incentivized to have as little calculated profit as possible.

Their subsidies and ability to charge different rates is partially based on their accounting. So they play Hollywood accounting tricks (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting).

They have been chastised on this repeatedly. For instance, "The FCC Had To Remind ISPs Not To Spend Taxpayer Subsidies On Booze, Trips To Disney World" (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151022/09232532594/fcc-h...) here, the $1,300,000 spent by an executive to buy a house for their children's use as college housing wasn't part of the profit. That's simply the cost of running business, as essential as keeping the lights on ... nothing wrong with the twice a week $96,000/year massages either, I'm sure that's got a lot to do with FTTH residential deployment. Oh wait, the taxpayers built that.

This has happened a few times, such as with verizon (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/are-the-salaries-of-veriz_b_9...) where the 4 top executive pay (without benefits) was $41 million ... which would have been fine if it was in their operating expense and they could afford it.

But they did this because it wasn't and they couldn't.

If the telcos make something called "Local Service" unprofitable when compared with "Corporate Operations Expense" (which includes jets, multiple homes, multi-million executive pay, etc) and technically run "at a loss" they can legally raise prices and reduce service.

Because they can make things look unprofitable, federal regulation permits them to raise prices to make up for it. It's an perverse incentive, an executive spends $100,000 a year on pet care to make sure local service becomes unprofitable and then they can use a legal procedure to raise prices. rinse, wash, and repeat.

So yes, it could be 1/4th the price but no, the free market is the most efficient allocator of goods, we're told. They do things the cheapest we're told, there is no alternative ... yeah, bullshit.

High speed internet is $7.67/month in Russia, $5.41 in Ukraine, $6.12 in Venezuela and $63.07 in the USA. Ah, the magic of trusting the market. Can you feel it!?

I am not in the US. And yes, fibre costs more, even double sometimes. I don't need fibre, I don't want to pay double. Leave my ADSL alone.

You're not in the US, so why did you bring up Google Fiber? Also if you're not in the US why are you talking about AT&T being forced to take away your ADSL?

Also the poster you replied to specifically said ADSL1 which has been superceded more than a decade ago by ADSL2, ADSL2+ and VDSL. These aren't fibre technologies and in most countries are sold at the same price.

Then you're likely in a very different situation. A condensed version of the US situation is that telcos here were incentivised through subsidies to upgrade and update the networking infrastructure to deliver more speeds and bandwidth to existing customers as well as connection to more rural customers. By and large, the telcos did not do that in spite of receiving the money.

ADSL1 from at&t tops out at 6Mbps, and 8Mbps generally, so you're most likely on ADSL2 (probably not VDSL, unless you're just plan limited, and not distance limited)

I suspect you're paying more than what I pay for gigabit FTTH, $50.

I pay 23€ a month. I could pay roughly what you pay for gigabit, I just don't need it

In my market ATT fiber is cheaper than ATT DSL, and obviously quite a bit faster.