Telecom is weird. Here are some plans from a small city in ND:

  $34.95/month* - High Speed Advantage - up to 15 Mbps down & 3 Mbps up
  $54.95/month* - High Speed Advantage Plus - up to 15 Mbps down & 10 Mbps up
  $104.95 to $114.95/month - High Speed Extreme Advantage - up to 50 Mbps down & 25 Mbps up

They have optical lines they keep adding and no bandwidth caps.

(apparently contrasting crappy service in Silicon Valley to rural areas is downvote worthy)

I think what you're experiencing is the situation where people execute the bearer of bad or unwelcome news.

Probably. It's funny how small groups tend to do great telecom service and large companies don't. Kinda relates to a startup mentality.

Which city?

NDTC in ND, so the Devils Lake region.

Due to cognitive biases, anecdotes are worse than no data. Definitely downvote worthy.

Then you should probably flag half the stories on the front page because that's is what most of them are. We aren't doing research studies here, we are talking about how chaotic telecom is and expecting everyone to provide all the pieces is just not going to happen.

Telecom is quite a different world. There are a number of small ISPs in North Bay that are trying to make a dent; see Sonic.net in sebastapol. http://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/20120506/BUSINESS/12050...

They aren't available in my neighborhood but I routinely check every month or so.

I've got 100mbit up/down for $50 per month in SF with webpass.