121–130 of 145 posts
I am always baffled at how US businesses can pretty much do and get away with anything they want, with little to no concequences. I'm not saying where I live is perfect but every time there's a scandal here I only need to look to the US to see we don't have it that bad.
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Yes, and: > The Comcast "Gigabit Pro" fiber connection that provides 10Gbps speeds costs $299.95 a month plus a $19.95 modem lease fee. It also requires a $500 installation charge and a $500 activation charge. For reference, I’m paying €25/mo for 10Gbit symmetric. Modem “lease” and installation included. To be fair, I get ~8Gbit/s in practice, but that’s well worth it.
Lemme guess, you're in the Netherlands. You folks have awesome internet because you force the local loop to be unbundled. Every country should do this. However, almost none do (except yours, and a few counties within the US state of Washington). Nobody with bundled local loops will get pricing+performance like this; please don't raise peoples' expectations. Instead, point them to the root cause (local loop bundling),…
No, Spain using Digi, which is a Romanian company. 10Gbit is only available in cities where Digi has their own fiber/equipment. When you’re in an area where the fiber is shared it’s 1Gbit max for same price.
> You folks have awesome internet because you force the local loop to be unbundled.
I don’t know what this means (although I can maybe guess). Can you explain it for sake of clarity?
> Nobody with bundled local loops will get pricing+performance like this; please don't raise peoples' expectations.
10Gbit sure, it’s not available everywhere. However, symmetric gigabit fiber is standard in many countries in Europe and elsewhere. Typically with 5+ major providers and local ISPs to choose from.
I lived in the US for a long time. I had to suffer the sub-par quality of cable, arbitrary price hikes and random downtime from shitty cable tech. You should absolutely raise your expectations. Complacency will do nothing but entrench the abysmal situation.
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While 30 million is too much, that’s less than 10% of the population. In the most populated areas it’s most common to have a duopoly. Sucks but “I don’t think there are many places that aren’t Comcast only” is not close to being accurate. They’re not even the dominant provider in Texas and New York. If anything it makes it easier for them to survive, antitrust below the national scale is much harder to apply.
DSL / wireless does not count. Very, very few homes have access to fiber. Most homes only have coaxial broadband, and most of those are only served by Comcast.
Of those 70 so million with fiber available about 30 million actually use it.
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While 30 million is too much, that’s less than 10% of the population. In the most populated areas it’s most common to have a duopoly. Sucks but “I don’t think there are many places that aren’t Comcast only” is not close to being accurate. They’re not even the dominant provider in Texas and New York. If anything it makes it easier for them to survive, antitrust below the national scale is much harder to apply.
It’s not a real number. > At least 49.7 million Americans only have access to broadband from one of the seven largest cable and telephone companies. In total, at least 83.3 million Americans can only access broadband through a single provider. > Over the past two years, federal stats suggest that Charter and Comcast have an absolute monopoly over fewer households, but we think this is mostly a mirage resulting from h…
> Don’t know why you’ve got such a pro-Comcast / Charter bent
Kindly go fuck yourself. Stick to facts without baseless accusations.
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DSL / wireless does not count. Very, very few homes have access to fiber. Most homes only have coaxial broadband, and most of those are only served by Comcast.
While it could be better, 70 million households is not 2x very few. I can only imagine you’re going off very outdated information. Of those 70 so million with fiber available about 30 million actually use it.
The FCC map is not reliable at all. You only see that fiber is not available when you search the address on the ISP website and it returns with the option for DSL. Even in the region I live now, the FCC map says fiber available in most of the city, but in reality, it’s only the newer housing developments. 90% are older homes in developments from a couple decades ago, and they only have coaxial.
The common factor in fiber availability is a housing development built after 2005 or even 2010, or built so long ago that the utilities are overhead and maybe they could string up fiber for a sufficiently low price.
Any home in any development built 1970 to 2010 with underground utilities that did not already have fiber will most likely not have fiber.
Also, any apartment building from before ~2010 will not have Ethernet wired to the apartment, only coaxial wires, and the apartment building owner is not going to wire it up for fiber, even if fiber is run to the building itself.
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While it could be better, 70 million households is not 2x very few. I can only imagine you’re going off very outdated information. Of those 70 so million with fiber available about 30 million actually use it.
I do not believe 70M households have fiber available. I have searched many, many houses in many, many metros, and the ones with fiber are few and far between. The FCC map is not reliable at all. You only see that fiber is not available when you search the address on the ISP website and it returns with the option for DSL. Even in the region I live now, the FCC map says fiber available in most of the city, but in reali…
I would personally never buy a house with comcast only and would likely not without fiber (I currently live in a Uverse/Shitcast ghetto which essentially leaves me with only one option). I sympathize with the shittiness of US broadband but I see no reason to stretch the facts, they suck regardless. And we do not represent the normal customer. In reality wireless options and even comcast are options to people if they compete on price, and fiber does have to compete with those in the real world.
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I do not believe 70M households have fiber available. I have searched many, many houses in many, many metros, and the ones with fiber are few and far between. The FCC map is not reliable at all. You only see that fiber is not available when you search the address on the ISP website and it returns with the option for DSL. Even in the region I live now, the FCC map says fiber available in most of the city, but in reali…
These numbers are from the FBA themselves, I don’t see how it is in their interests to lie that way (they have anticonsumer reasons for not doing so, this is not a defense). I’m more inclined that you’re experiencing sampling bias. Infrastructure is clustered - fiber or anything like that is not “few and far between”. More like large swaths have coverage within deserts. If you’re always looking two doors from the hou…
I don’t know why they would lie either, maybe they are using FCC maps since that is the best data they can afford. And given the low rates of new construction, I still doubt the figures, given the economics of a business installing fiber in older neighborhoods with underground utilities.
I would love to be wrong though, as I also nix living in any place only served by coaxial internet.
> In reality wireless options and even comcast are options to people if they compete on price, and fiber does have to compete with those in the real world.
Yes, which is why installing fiber has to be a taxpayer funded effort by the government, because it will never make financial sense for a business to spend all that money to install the infrastructure and have Comcast just lower their prices to below the fiber business’s installation costs.
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Yes, and: > The Comcast "Gigabit Pro" fiber connection that provides 10Gbps speeds costs $299.95 a month plus a $19.95 modem lease fee. It also requires a $500 installation charge and a $500 activation charge. For reference, I’m paying €25/mo for 10Gbit symmetric. Modem “lease” and installation included. To be fair, I get ~8Gbit/s in practice, but that’s well worth it.
I pay CHF 64.75 (~USD 75) a month for 25gbit symmetric in Switzerland. I can not understand how they can get away with charging 200+ for 10G. That is nuts. But we have providers selling bullshit here too. One such provider claims 5G wireless is the equivalent of fiber. Sells 1gbit but actuall throughput is bellow 300mbit even with the best tower. Theoretical max is 2gbit but their equipment can't even do 1. Misleadin…
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I have had it since 2017, though they upgraded it to 10g a year or two ago. It’s not vapor ware. It’s just that $8,000 doesn’t buy you much distance (I think it’s 1/3 of a mile from the nearest fiber node).
Oh I know it definitely exists, it’s just so far from residential grade and costs like 5% of what it would cost if you had a business. Strange product. I’m banned from upgrading beyond gigabit because my wife knows that I’d have to run fiber through the house so it’s all beyond my ability anyway. I’m jealous.
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I don't know how coax internet works, or how the channel allocations work, but it seems to me if they can offer 2Gbps/200Mbps already why can't we opt for a channel reallocation and get like 1Gbps symmetrical, or at least 1Gbps/500Mbps or something? I do understand the legacy channel allocations were designed for almost entirely download - but 2Gbps? That can't be...
> I don't know how coax internet works, or how the channel allocations work, but it seems to me if they can offer 2Gbps/200Mbps already why can't we opt for a channel reallocation and get like 1Gbps symmetrical, or at least 1Gbps/500Mbps or something? Because they cannot actually offer it, it is all marketing bullshit. Always assume coaxial upload bandwidth is slim to none. They probably just advertise a burst speed…