Dropbox doesn't have a 1TB plan, but 2x500GB costs $1000/year. On Drive, it costs $100/year. That's a difference of $900/year.

I don't know where you live, but around here $900/year buys you a pretty fucking good connection, with blackjack and hookers included.

it can also take a very long time.

So what? You can still use Drive until everything is copied.

Well, that's terrible and you are no doubt aware of that. I live in Philadelphia and pay $74.95 per month for Unlimited home phone service, Prime TV channel lineup and 75 Mbps downstream and 35 Mbps upstream unlimited Internet through Verizon FIOS.

I currently use both Dropbox and OneDrive but this pricing is ridiculously cheap. I've been purposely holding back on the things I back up onto cloud because of its costs but if competitors don't follow suit I'll be switching. The main thing I haven't been backing up in the cloud are the ~ 400 GB of home movies I have.

300 down / 20 up with a 1 TB cap doesn't come cheap when no competition exists at those speeds. If it were even offered in my area, fibre from the same company is north of $3000/year, and for that all I get is symmetric uplink.

Still, at 300 down, 1 TB = 8388608 mbits / 300 mbits/s = 466 minutes or just under 8 hours. And luckily, my monthly cap is 1 TB. (Also lucky: I don't download 24/7 to hit that cap in under 8 hours.)

50Mbit down - 50Mbit up - no data caps (or so they say).

And yes, I do (provided the other end is capable) see those speeds.

Yeah. I noticed that too -- if a site is slow, I now either blame the location-unaware Google DNS (because of crappy ISP-provided DNS) or I know to blame the site. Even if I hardcode an alkamai address for my favourite streaming site, the only way I get to top speed is by 802.11ac when my Nexus 5 is cooperating (it really likes the stability of G or N) or by plugging in with gigabit Ethernet. But wow, it makes the Internet at work seem blazing slow. A reverse from the 90s, eh? ;-)

Funny. I would have thought more people on HN would chime in with plans $100+. Of course it also makes it harder for me to shop for a dedicated server -- since I really want gigE or 10gigE to serve things fast enough to myself. And the sad truth is I know I'll see 600-1.2gbits over copper before I see fiber optics. I give it another 2-3 years tops. (Why? I'm already hooked up locally to 600mbps, but they only use half right now.) I just hope prices don't double again, as 5 years ago this plan was nearly half off for half the speed.

That said, I'd pay the same to Google Fiber if they chose Toronto next year (yes, I know it's near double), just so I could have a proper, local DNS service from my ISP with no search hijacking. Is it too much to ask a telco for respect to go along with speed?

As residential users we are I think prone to forget how much cheaper and faster our unreliable async connections are in comparison to business broadband.

a t1 was "fast" about 15 years ago, so if you learned a tiny bit about business class internet right around when you were 20 like I did, that's how fast a connection would have been around then.

Even if you go for a business-class connection, it's $70/month for 16/3.

In short, you need to find a better ISP. :)

Severely.

Yeah, I guess I'd call that "choice".

And yes it can take a long time, but you might swap cloud providers every 2-5 years, you're not doing it every day. Even if it still takes a month to copy all your files, that's generally an unattended process, so it's not such a big deal.

I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's not a huge deal. All things considered, it's pretty easy to switch.

Not if you have Google Fiber!

Of course, you have to hope they don't exit that business, as well.