I'm in a rural city in Thailand, fiber 2Gbps is $50 / mo. And this is just for normie. Like unimpressive.

I'm in a top 10 most expensive city in the world (Canada) and the best I can get for $50 is 80 Mbps (and even that is only available as a promotion that you can't get by simply going to the ISP's website and buying a plan).

I'm in Vancouver and paying about 55 CAD plus taxes for 300Mbps. So it's possible to get a bit more for similar money. The downside of that is however those are not available as regular offers, and you constantly have to deal with ISPs and rention programs to keep the price down. Even had various events where the ISP randomly increased the price inside one month, until I gave them a call and ask to fix it again.

This price randomness never occured to me in germany, and just booking a fixed low price on a website was so much more convenient.

I live in Germany. Enjoying 10 Mbit/s downstrean and 1 Mbit/s upstream. For 30 Euros per month. 80 would be like heaven for me.

Well, elsewhere in Germany you can get 2.5GBit/s fiber...

Berlin?

Not yet i think.

I'm in Vancouver, BC and paying 80$/mo for 1Gbps symmetric. I could get 2.5Gbps but it would be about twice the cost - and I would have to get something that can do 2.5G link speed on an SFP+, not many devices can.

I'm in the suburbs of the most expensive city in the world and I get 1gbps for $70 CAD

$50 gets me 2Mb ADSL here in the city centre of Glasgow. Your lucky.

I’m within 2km of Parliament and can’t get fibre. It’s disgusting.

In Winnipeg, Canada, I get 500Mbps up/down for 75$.

Have you looked at smaller ISPs?

I live in rural BC and I'm was able to get 80Mb for $35 using a no-name internet only provider with no contract.

If I went with one of the big cable companies I would be paying at least double for the same thing

I've looked at the smaller ISPs in my area and they're terrible as far as pricing goes. Both the "major" options are still using Rogers' last-mile infrastructure, they offer poorer customer service (because of the previous point), charge the same or more money for the same level of service and offer no real incentive to switch. Having talked to some techs at TekSavvy, none of the smaller ISPs can offer anything interesting like synchronous speeds over coax/DOCSIS because they have little/no control over how the last-mile infrastructure is run. For that same reason they can't offer anything faster than 1G down either. It all feels like smoke and mirrors, and the CRTC seems to have a vested interest in keeping internet prices sky-high.

Yeah the last mile stuff is still owned by the majors, but at least the choice exists.

As much as Canadian telecom seems to own the CRTC it isn’t nearly as consumer unfriendly as when I lived in the US.

I had an apartment in downtown Seattle which had 2 choices for internet. Many of my friends were quite impressed since most addresses are only served by one ISP.

How is your internet provisioned? Is the no-name ISP building their own infrastructure or are they using the network of a larger one?

In Canada the infrastructure owners are required to give access to small providers at a regulated price.

So my internet is provided by Lightspeed on Shaw cable.

I use a local provider in NYC, and I used one in Seattle. I think both of them had some kind of point to point connection on the roof.

i signed up with one of the small ISPs in rural Canada. month after, they were bought by Rogers... :-(

Is this Toronto?

I'm Swiss and had Init7.

Moved to Thailand (BKK) in 2016 and was so disappointed by a very new condominium in the center, which didn't even allowed for FTTH lines.

Real Estate Developers usually make contracts within their Condos, to force the whole building to use only one provider.

How affordable is $50 in rural Thailand compared to the USA?

The US has around ~10-12 times the disposable median income of Thailand (2019 figures), and ~10 times the GDP per capita of Thailand (2022 IMF estimates).

It's like a typical consumer in the US spending $500+ per month for broadband. Even worse if you consider the rural income factor. Absolutely insane.

For a fraction of that you can get 1gbps from Comcast and you'll never utilize most of it in 99% of consumer situations.

I'm in a small quasi rural 'city' in the US, hours away from any consequential city, and I can get 1.2gbps from Comcast for 15-20% of the income adjusted rate in question referenced for Thailand.

It seems common to forget how astoundingly high US median income, disposable income, and GDP per capita figures are compared to the rest of the world. The latest 2022 estimates are pegging US GDP per capita at nearly double that of France and Japan. To match up on median disposable income figures, you have to use hyper affluent countries like Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway as references. Then people come on HN and proclaim how they're paying only $20 per month for Internet access, in a country with 1/10-1/5 the median disposable income of the US. The US is more expensive than it should be for Internet access (better telecom competition would go a long ways toward fixing that), however the reality is US income figures are also a lot higher than most of the developed world.

That’s not a reasonable comparison for Thailand food prices as food isn’t disposable income. World bank says GDP per capita PPP was 18,232$ in 2020 down from 19,233$ in 2019. Of course that’s not evenly distributed, but rural vs urban incomes mean costs are higher in cities than median income suggests. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...

Where your number comes into play is for people pricing Netflix subscriptions.

GDP PPP per capita is an extraordinarily low quality metric.

You end up with absurd examples where Botswana is comparable to China; Russia is comparable to Greece; Puerto Rico is comparable to Spain, ahead of Portugal, and just a bit lower than Japan; Kazakhstan is just a bit behind Latvia and Slovakia; Taiwan is far ahead of Finland, France, UK, New Zealand.

It’s just a question of what you’re trying to use these numbers for.

Imputed rent for example is one of those things that’s kind of silly on the face of it but makes various comparisons more reasonable. On the other hand it can also imply a great deal of economic activity that isn’t actually happening.

PPP is the same sort of calculation. If rents crash because a great deal of housing was built it can make GDP comparisons kind of meaningless. The country has more tangible wealth, people are better off, yet GDP falls. That’s not what you want the number to represent.

Both Nominal and PPP are out of whack if you are looking to learn about conditions on the ground. GDP measures the production of a certain country (and it's a very bad metric at that). Some countries are wealthy because its people make money from foreign sources. This is usually displayed by a high and chronic trade deficit.

That means you can have two countries with comparable GDP per-capita, where one of them have a more affluent population and able to pay higher prices.

I’m just wondering how good of a measure it is comparing the median incomes of different countries. If a there is a country A with 10x median income of some other country B , then the people of country A are really 10x more affluent than that of country B? especially if they pay 10x for everything?

In my home in downtown Chicago I have two wired options. 1.5Mbps for $60/month from AT&T, or $71,000 install plus $800 a month for 2Gbps from Comcast.

I went with 5G from T-Mobile for $50 a month.

$50 is about 1 week of 3 meals consumption per day (lower middle class)

So a bit under $2.50/meal. That’s very comparable to lower/lower-middle in the USA.

In capital city, I'd say it's about $4-5/meal (including drink) in daily basis. For those who eat lots of things, $7/meal makes them full.

---

footnote here: official income record of thai people/businesses does not really reflect reality. Lots of entities are kind of off-system.

Where do you spend 120 baht a meal? That's a restaurant meal, not the average meal. I don't spend more than 60 baht in Bangkok. At $7 (250 baht) you're talking about a night out (maybe except alcohol), way off of the "average meal".

I worked in BKK since 2016 and office staff usually goes to the cheapo restaurants (which I frequented too), so 40-80 baht is completely common also for white collar workers. But meat, vegetable and oil quality is really shady in that price range.

I prefer to order grab of around 120-200 baht from a "healthy" place or going for restaurants within Central 200-400 baht per meal.

(including drink) .. if you eat rice something with water everyday, it's quite a tight lifestyle.

I love the tightest lifestyle eating rice and 1-2 side dishes from street vendors who deserve the money rather than foreign investors to extract money from the economy like leeches.

$2.50/meal prepared outside, not from ingredients like in the US. You can easily get a meal for 40 baht across Thailand ($1.20)

The funny thing about rice with something, most of the time you want to add an fried egg too (more likely like + 10 bath charge). Crispy Pork is about 10 bath more expensive than the other. I think 40 bath is like 5 years ago pricing. You can still get it somewhere. 50-60 bath is more standard now.

Where did you get that number?

A decade of data set from my experience and network. Not from govt.

But is that within the city / country, or to outside the country, too? International bandwidth can be completely mediocre compared to local bandwidth. What I do is change the Server in speedtest.net to one in New York / wherever I have business in and test it out (from Hong Kong).

I work remotely with american friends for years, video meeting has always been smooth (I never test traceroute though)

USA requires more raw materials to provide services. United States is about 19 times bigger than Thailand. Thailand is approximately 513,120 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km, making United States 1,816% larger than Thailand. And then there is the duopoly of ISPs where they carve out huge chunks and agree not to compete.

I live in a metro area in the US and thousands of homes in my community do not have land-based broadband options. The US incumbents have totally failed and it isn't because there's a lot of desert in the West and Alaska. I'm sick of this argument which doesn't explain why city dwellers in most places in America have the worst internet in the developed world.

I live in the middle of nowhere USA. I'm about 1,000 feet off the road (that only random farms are on, about 20 miles from the small city we're near).

My local ISP trenched fiber to my house for free and provides gig internet for $80/month.

The funny thing is my previous house was in town and I had to settle for 100Mbit for the same price. ISPs are all sorts of messed up.

It’s all about what it costs to upgrade - if a rural ISP has to upgrade copper infrastructure for whatever reason they’ll fiber it.

In the city it’s often just as easy to let what is working continue “working” - a major rollout takes a lot of money.

Yep engineering the new network, pulling permits, hiring the contractor, buying new equipment/lines all cost $$$$$$

Yup, I live in San Francisco proper, and my only choice is Comcast cable. Looks like the current promo pricing for 1200Mbps is around $70/mo, but I can't quickly find what the normal price is. And I assume the uplink is something abysmal like 25Mbps.

(I'm on Comcast's Business service, $250/mo for 1000/35 [long dumb story why]. Most of the time I see under 600 down when checking on speed test sites, and real-world speeds downloading large files rarely exceeds 250. I expect real-world speeds on the non-business service are even worse.)

It's pretty embarrassing that this is the state of things.

Most of San Francisco can be served by Wave (cable). Sonic also has a large presence in San Francisco as well.

Over in Oakland I am paying $40/mo to Sonic for 10Gbps (though I only have equipment to route at 1Gbps at the moment)

I'm also in SF Bay Area and I just had 3 Gbps symmetric fiber installed by Comcast. This is their $299/mo "Gigabit Pro" option. I posted about it on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/comments/tkmv9y/upd...

There's a benchmark posted there showing that the speed is really as advertised.

I live in a not-very-metro area in the usa and get gigabit fiber for $65/mo.

I'm in Jersey City and have fios, 1gbit for $70 a month

Let's consider Gross National Product of each county adjusted for population size:

gnpUSD = {'USA': 21,650,000,000,000, 'THA': 491,910,000,000} #4th quarter 2021

pop = {'USA': 329,000,000, 'THA': 70,000,000} #as of 2021

gnp['USA'] // pop['USA'] 65805

gnp['THA'] // pop['THA'] 7027

Seems more like a distribution of resources issue... so why not jack up taxes on the wealthiest 1% and use it to pay for things like high-speed fiber in all the rural areas? Doubtless this would lead to economic growth?

It isn’t a ‘tax the 1%’ issue, it’s a corruption and market capture issue in the US that we refuse to acknowledge.

Throwing more money at it usually makes that kind of problem WORSE not better.

FDR's Rural Electricity Cooperatives did a lot to electrify much of the midwest and rural south, along with the creation of the TVA. I doubt anyone would want to rely on the current major providers, Comcast etc., who have such a bad track record, to accomplish this. Municipal broadband sounds like a better option:

> "The Rural Electrification Act of 1936, enacted on May 20, 1936, provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve isolated rural areas of the United States. The funding was channeled through cooperative electric power companies, hundreds of which still exist today. (wiki)"

There are fair few places in the US where the local power company also owns a fiber network and provides (relatively speaking) super cheap gigabit or multi-gigabit internet service

However there are just as many places where the state's government was bought off to ban such networks because the majors are afraid of actual competition.

Don’t forget the existing providers have already received massive funds to ‘improve rural broadband’ in the same vein as that act. Hundred of billions of dollars if I remember correctly.

It’s mostly been ineffective.

I know. It's several factors, density, history of infra of telecom companies etc.

Sheer size isn't what you should compare. Population density is much more relevant. Granted, Thailand still comes out ahead, but by far less than your size comparison (33.6/km^2 vs 132/km^2)

Reading this thread, I am reminded of how cheap telco prices are in France: e.g. in 2020, fibre internet plans averaged between €26 and €28.35 (USD 28-30 at current rates) per month.[0]

Mobile plans are also on the cheap side, to the point of being competitive with many third world countries (for example, I wasn't that impressed with prices in Thailand in 2020 for comparable plans, only a 1-2€ difference with what I had at home).

This is getting to the point that I find myself often suggesting fellows from border countries open a line in France, just so that they can enjoy the "European roaming data envelope" that comes with most plans (i.e. several gigabytes are free to use from anywhere in Europe, and you can make calls and texts to other EU countries when abroad...) after realizing how expensive and suckish mobile plans are in their country (Belgium in this instance).

[0] https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/Best-and...

> enjoy the "European roaming data envelope"

Which provider would you recommend? I remember taking a look a while back and the most viable option was Free, but 15.99 EUR a month for when I need roaming 3–4 times a year seemed a bit excessive at 180.- per year.

For your specific use case, I'd say give Lebara mobile a shot.[0]

SIM card is free, you can top it up with a prepaid amount or do a one-month plan without renewing it, and I just checked their T&Cs relating to roaming and they are actually quite generous[1][2].

Besides, their website is (for the most part) translated in English due to their target demographic, so no need for full French fluency here!

Some good info in English on the French telco landscape can be found at [3].

[0] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/

[1] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/international-call-rates

[2] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/terms-and-conditions#section...: See section 2.4.2 (in French unfortunately)

[3] https://en.selectra.info/broadband-phone-france/guides/mobil...

Edit: missing word

I'll nention it for completeness sake: another possible solution, albeit a bit cumbersome, would be to get a regular contract-free plan but suspend it for the period you don't need it.

A cursory search indicates that both Orange and Bouygues (as well as their contract-free offshoots, Sosh and B&YOU respectively) still offer this as a paid option at 5€ and 7€ per month respectively.

This means you could get the plan appropriate for your needs, then suspend it (for at most 6 month per year it seems) and only reactivate it when you need it.

However since this procedure requires getting in touch with customer service, it should be reserved for people well versed in French :-)

Edit: adding links (all in French)

https://www.echosdunet.net/dossiers/suspendre-ligne#suspensi...

https://assistance.sosh.fr/faq/308268

https://www.assistance.bouyguestelecom.fr/s/article/suspensi...

Thanks. France really does have insanely good mobile plans!

You need a French address though.

I was under the impression that they only requested an ID and a mean of payment, but after verification you are right, a proof of residency is also required for postpaid plans.

If you know someone in France, you may ask them to make a "solemn declaration" that you live at their address; then you only need provide their own proof of residency (people living with their parents routinely do so).

Tourist and prepaid SIM cards are still exempted and, depending on your case, can prove quite interesting.

In a large French city with 10gb/s fibre connection at 50 euros à month (internet, TV, fixed line phone). More than enough for two people working from home + family.

There are other ISPs in the states that are much more competitive (I work at one). Unfortunately, if you're not in a fairly dense area, the chances they can deliver to you is minimal, since building your own network is expensive.

For example, we offer $40 service, and if you're in our historical areas that's 1Gbit symmetrical, and if you're in newer areas we've turned up in the last year that's 10Gbit symmetrical.

We're expanding (as I expect most ISPs that can undercut the major players that much are), but it requires actually stringing fiber through neighborhoods on poles, so it takes a while (but that can be scaled...).

If you don't have telephone poles, it's much harder/more expensive to build out an area, so often those are skipped (at least initially) as areas cheaper to deliver to are prioritized. The is unfortunately a lot of new development, as they'll build neighborhood with underground utilities and pre-wire AT&T and Comcast, making it hard for others to deliver to the area without a lot of cost and work (trenching).

I have a sometimes 12mbit connection, but there's a Fiber POP about 1 mile down the road. There are phone poles (with fiber on them) between here and there. What does it cost to string fiber on poles, and what are the hopes of getting right of way? Alternatively, is there some way to pay / force the telco to build out FTTH?

Some people a few miles away have a fiber POP at the end of their shared driveway, and are trying to decide if they should pay the extra couple hundred per house to go from 1GBit to 25GBit symmetric to the houses.

In the US I believe anyone can use the pole space as long as it's not taken, but I'm not an expert. I do know you have to fill out engineering documents per-pole to explain the load and propose (pay for?) fixing the load bearing attached cables.

At the ISP I work for, I believe we spec out the cabling we need to a neighborhood and then order a special bundle with breakouts at specific locations along the length to serve locations, and then string that along the poles. I'm not sure why we wouldn't serve a house with one of those, but those go back to a central point in a neighborhood, and it's possible the backhaul from the central office to that central point in the neighborhood passes houses that aren't served. Where to build is all about ease of wiring an area and housi g density. It's all about cost per houses passed. The good news is that maybe your area is slated to get fiber since it goes by there, and it's just a matter of the lower hanging fruit being picked first.

Thanks. The polls are ancient (1980's; most bow 10-20 degress under the tension of the existing tensioning cables.)

This street got sold off to a bankrupt telco (from what I can tell, their business model is to buy up unprofitable lines, then periodically file for bankruptcy).

There are a few local fiber providers. Maybe I could call and see what it would take to convince them to build out. (There is definitely demand here.)

Alternatively AT&T (who is not our local telco) keeps spamming us to get a business fiber to the home connection. They make it clear they'll ban customers that appear to be using it for residential traffic, but I think that sort of traffic discrimination falls afoul of California's network neutrality laws. Has anyone tried calling their bluff on that?

It's a lot of work, but if you survey the area and get people to sign something saying they would buy pay up to $X for gigabit fiber or better, you might be able to approach some of those independent ISPs and lay the case out, you might get them to reprioritize your area (but it may or may not cover the same area you surveyed).

Be careful approaching incumbent major ISPs or letting them know if you got the signatures though. You might find they went out and offered sweetheart deals to the same people on two year contracts, but at existing service levels...

Regarding business fiber, I think they're more trying to keep people from reselling it as a micro ISP. If you're willing to pay business costs for personal use, I don't think they'll care. If you split the cost between 10 neighbors, they might. There may be other concerns they are dealing with that I'm not thinking of though.

One thing most people ignore: the prices these days for many thing don't have a direct correlation with the cost, but with how much people are willing to pay. This is happen especially in quasi-monopoly situations, like housing and internet services.

For example I have 3 Internet connections at home that I pay ~ $30 in total, from 150 Mbps to 1 Gbps. I think the 1 Gbps is ~ $12/month, it is so cheap because there are so many options and I can afford to keep all 3 for redundancy (1 is a 4G mobile data capped at 200GB/month, it works even when there is a power failure in the entire neighborhood).

But if there is no variety of options and no competition, then price is high. From what I read, most ISP in USA are squeezing as much as they can from their clients, sometimes to ridiculous levels.

I get upgrade offers all the time.

But it doesn’t matter because it isn’t actually offered in my area / the local telco can’t even notify the right people…

I don't think they do any longer but Verizon used to send me FIOS flyers on a fairly regular basis and when I went to their site it looked as if it wasn't actually available at my address (where I get Comcast).

Also amusingly, both Comcast and Verizon have the very old (as in multiple decades) name for the street I live on as my address. It's only somewhat wrong (the name used to have a North on it)--but it is still wrong.

AT&T called me. They said their technical guys think they might be able to upgrade the connection to my building from 1.5Mbps to 3Mbps if I want to sign-up with them. I'm in downtown Chicago.

I really, really hope you told them to fuck the hell off.

The guy on the phone was so cool. He was totally "in" on how hilariously awful it was that they could only get 1.5Mbps into my building. He had access to the system that let him see all the contracts of my neighbors and what connections they had and was floored that every building next me had gigabit.

I’m a tech-minded American that pays $65 per month for a 1 Gbps up and down line that I am completely satisfied with.

Until recently I paid $35 per month for a 300 Mbps line because I couldn’t justify the jump to 1 Gbps.

Then I had to upload some local Hyper-V servers to AWS to convert them to AMIs and figured what the heck I’d upgrade the line.

I would have no interest in upgrading beyond 1 Gbps right now though. There are too many infrastructure components that need to be upgraded to attain that and I don’t have a use case for it.

On the other hand, try making 10-15k/month in europe in a regular tech job, esp. with little experience (0-3yr).

It's orders of magnitude more uncommon than doing so in the USA.

So bring all the hate :)

That’s all very well if you have a tech job. If you have a low paid job you’re utterly screwed in the US. I’d rather make less so my fellow citizens can live a decent life too.

It's hard to do, but at least I can get fired and not worry about health insurance.

I feel you.

Here in Australia: $90/month nets you “100/40mb”, which is really more like “~85mb down, 25 up but only a quiet night, if you’re next to the router, and it hasn’t rained within the last week”.

It’s much, much better than it used to be at least (depending on where you live + NBN technology choice of course). And yet still completely hamstrung by the mess the current government made of the original NBN plan.

If you live in an area that can get HFC, FTTP, FTTN etc. it’s possible these days to get a pretty consistent 1000/50 for $150/month. Those fibre services are pretty stable in my experience, definitely a million times better than the old broadband which as you put got destroyed by bad weather and distance from the exchange.

Did you mean FTTC instead of FTTN? FTTN can rarely get close to the max of 100/40 in best case scenarios.

I did indeed, thanks. Too many acronyms!

The area of Sydney I live in has HFC-based NBN offered only, and it still falls over if it rains too much.

Apparently you can pay money to have fibre routed to your house from the nearest node/etc, but I rent, so I’m not going to do that.

You can but it's EXPENSIVE. Something like $5k-20k depending on residence and technology choice you have.

If you have to be "next to the router" than it's a problem with your infrastructure, not then NBN

The point is, that even if I were to plug my computer directly into the router, I'm not getting _good_ speeds, I simply wanted to head off comments like "have you tried 5Ghz networks? Have you tried a quieter band? Have you tried x/y/z other thing?".

Brooklyn here, my building still doesn’t have fiber — I’ve complained to the city for years! I get to pay $75/month for 200Mbps down, 10 Mbps up. I’ve been told fiber is coming for almost 15 years.

Most cities >100k in the Midwest can get fiber for $55-$200/month at speeds 1-10Gb/s.

Where I’m at it’s $80/month for a 5gb/s. If you want that in a major city, >1m people; good luck.

Corruption, regulation and development costs are just too high.

Rather sad to be honest.

With a best effort connection Id rather have a well oiled setup, without cgnat, a good cpe, sensible throttling etc and 100mbps than whatever huge amount of gbps.

It's easy to get all the above and fast internet without much trouble. An old PC with OPNsense can do that.