The answer is, it's complex. It really depends heavily on where you are - and streets matter. But many people only have one or maybe two choices for wired, broadband Internet: DSL or Cable.

I live in a suburb of a medium sized city. At my house, I have 3 choices for wired Internet access: Knology/WOW, AT&T DSL, AT&T Uverse. DSL is right out because it's too slow, so really it's a choice between Cable (Knology) and AT&T's Uverse (which is FTTN or FTTP depending on various factors).

We moved here a couple years ago, two miles away from our old house. Same city, same suburb, just 2 miles difference. At our old house, we didn't have Uverse as an option - it was just slow DSL through the phone company or a single cable provider. If I had lived three streets over (less than 100 yards), I would have had a choice between Comcast or Knology cable, and DSL.

In other areas of the suburb that are further out, you start to see Mediacom (another cable provider). There are probably some areas that Comcast and Mediacom overlap in.

I have a coworker that lives in a rural area, and all he has is Windstream DSL. Cable doesn't reach out that far.

http://www.broadbandmap.gov/number-of-providers/wireline/ser...

Unfortunately, the min/max slider forces hard-coded values during page load, so I can't link to specific graphs. I suggest checking out "served areas"/min:1/max:1 and "unserved areas"/min:2/max:whatever.

Those maps suggest the "1 ISP" set (or any set, really) is fairly uniformly distributed across the nation. In my opinion, it's not quite as biased towards the urban/rural divide I expected.

http://www.broadbandmap.gov/summarize/nationwide

    #ISP %USA
    0    3.3%
    1    8.9%
    2   32.0%
    3   35.6%
    4   14.3%
    5    4.1%
    6    1.3%
    7    0.4%
    8+   0.2%

So it's a minority, but a substantial one. I would also guess that at least "some" of the 2-ISP group have various barriers that make it de facto 1-ISP.

Regardless, 8.9% of the nation is still a LOT of people, and "2 or 3 providers across the nation" isn't really a thriving economy full of healthy competition.

The interesting data points, I think, are the high end. A 4-ISPs isn't THAT different from 1-ISP (8.9% vs 14.3%), and those numbers drop off fast in the 5+ range.

Oh, and yes, I'm excluding radio, in any form ("G[0-9]", various satellite/asymmetric services, etc). Those are a different product entirely, and any similarity in feature set is only superficial. You can't play games or any other low-latency task over most wireless, and VoIP doesn't like the "several second" latencies of satellite, for example.

The last mile. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile)

Most places are wired with one phone line, and one cable line. That phone line is generally owned by one specific phone company, and that cable line is generally owned by one specific cable provider.

So those are the choices of ISP: you can choose cable service or dsl.

For a few years the last mile over phone had to be shared with other IP providers, so you could choose between a) one cable company, or b) a few IP over DSL ISPs, but that ended sometime back.

There is also satellite providers, but they usually, I believe make a deal with your phone company, wireless, which is expensive, and fiber, which to my understanding is still just an upgrade from the over cable company.

How is the last mile provided in Ireland? And what are your choices of ISPs?

It is common in Europe that owners of the phone lines must give other ISPs access to it (for a - regulated - price). This in turn stems from the fact that the owners of the phone lines are (or used to be) owned by the state.

>> "Most places are wired with one phone line, and one cable line. That phone line is generally owned by one specific phone company, and that cable line is generally owned by one specific cable provider."

That seems to be where things differ. My phone line is owned by BT but I can still order internet through a different company. I pay that company an extra £10-15 per month for line rental (so I guess BT, even though they own the line chooses/or has to rent it to others).

Yeah, we had that for a few years during the 90s. I forget when we lost that, but it wasn't good.

I can't recall the last time I even heard of somebody in the US having the choice of more than two high-speed ISPs. At best, your choice is cable from one company and DSL or fiber from another. I'm sure there must be some places where there's three or more, but they must be extremely rare.

There are more if you count wireless, but those don't really work as a substitute for real home broadband, even with companies (e.g. Clear) that pretend they do.

Ireland and Britain enjoy better competition since they're a smaller area. Australia and the US OTOH are terrible since the population is so spread out (Australia's slightly better as the population is mainly coastal).

That's a cop-out. Services in the UK are either over the Virgin cable (HFC) network, or BT-owned copper/FTTC. The reason there's competition is a solid system of regulation which ensures fair and reasonable access to the infrastructure.

That's quite a different posture though. BT was a government owned corp, and when it was privatized, investors bought it subject to the restrictions in its license. In comparison, the cable companies built their infrastructure against the backdrop of deregulation, in which it was illegal for them to be granted exclusive franchises.

If this defense had any merit, then there should be far better options in large American cities. This is not the case.

No Britain enjoys better competition because BT's final mile is heavily regulated so that competitors can offer services and are charged regulated prices for access to the unbundled local loop.

The BT Group was also forcibly split into separate operating companies, particularly OpenReach which owns the local loops and sells services to all ISPs including BT Retail.

Most US municipalities have a franchise agreement for a particular service. The franchisee has exclusive rights to provide a service in the franchised area. So there is often one cable tv provider and one wired telephone provider in an area. This naturally leads to one cable internet and one DSL provider. Some areas do also have a fiber provider (Verizon FiOS, Google Fiber).

These same areas are often also serviced by wireless providers, either cellular, satellite or some other kind of fixed wireless.

Note that while DSL tends to be available in every market, it may not actually be available at your home due to distance from the CO. Or it may be available but you're so far away that the performance would not be worth what it cost.

So the problem is that there's a clear hierarchy of what's good in any area. Where I live it's cable > DSL >> wireless/satellite. Compound this with the pricing structure: where I live it's wireless/satellite >> cable == dsl, with cable having some speed tiers that DSL can't match. At the end of the day, for any consumer trying to make a decision on value and performance, there's often really only one option.

I'm going to assert that this is how it looks for the majority of the geographical US. I'm not sure about the larger metro areas.

I have a choice between Time Warner's Road Runner cable based broadband, or a fairly lousy DSL provider.

I live in a middle/upper-middle class suburban area in upstate New York.

Are those all some form of DSL? Is there a big choice of phone companies? I know in the UK, its BT and a couple of resellers. Do you still have to pay for a phone line rental to someone else?

In the US, you generally have a choice between one (two if you're lucky) cable companies and DSL.

You have to remember that, compared to the US, Ireland is tiny. The majority of the US population does not live in large urban areas, who while New York for example might have lots of choices, Spokane probably doesn't.

While this is true, it doesn't really explain the situation in the US, IMO, since the very populous urban centers here suffer as badly, if not more so, than the more rural areas.

If you live in a sparsely populated area the excuse is "well, it is expensive to wire you up because of distances". If you live in a densely populated area the excuse is "well, it costs a lot of money to put new infrastructure into a densely populated area".

In both cases, lots of other countries are managing to do both of those at far lower cost to the consumer than occurs here in the US. Ultimately the ISPs here in the US are just greedy, duopolistic fucks.

New York does NOT have choice. I live in Manhattan (Upper East Side) and have the choice between $60 1/15Mbps Time Warner Cable and $40 1Mbps Verizon DSL. Theoretically some people in the city have access to Verizon FiOS but I haven't met these people and complaining about ISPs is pretty common for the locals.

The only factor that determines the quality of your ISP options is having a competitive player in the market.

Depends.

Many people in the US have quite a bit of choices: Cable, DSL, Cell+Internet, Wireless. Usually those that live in large urban areas. But the service and quality of these ISP's varies greatly, which Comcast--in my area, being top.

Those Americans that live in rural areas, may not even have access to high speed internet, or always on internet--see the Xbox 1 fiasco for more details.

"Many people in the US have quite a bit of choices: Cable, DSL, Cell+Internet, Wireless. Usually those that live in large urban areas. But the service and quality of these ISP's varies greatly, which Comcast--in my area, being top."

This needs to be emphasized more. We rarely get to choose between equally cost-effective ISP options. The typical choice is one cable company, one phone company, and some kind of wireless service (possibly satellite). That is not competition, any more than heavy truck sales compete with mo-ped sales.

Same here. I'm in Bangalore, India, and I am spoilt for choice! There are about half a dozen ISPs that are recognized nationwide and then there are about a dozen that are specific to Bangalore with comparable QoS. And I also hear that ISP costs in US is really high in comparison. I really wonder why do they not come under anti-trust laws.

There are normally only one or two low cost options. There are often some higher cost options. For example, in the Bay Area there is high speed microwave internet available, but it comes out to more like 150/mo.