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This is a pretty silly comment given the "private" options that could have been at gbps speed for a decade+ are still at DSL and Cable speeds. Blind faith in 'the market' to solve these things after it's failed to do so seems odd.
It has given us starlink. The market makes interesting decisions.
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The market works when there's at least 4-5 competitors. That's enough to make monopolistic backroom deals impractical.
That is what driving me nuts about these threads. These aren’t free markets. They’re government regulated into being something else entirely, then people stomp their feet and complain about capitalism.
As someone who has 1/1000th of that bandwidth to the Internet, and yet still only saturates that connection when transferring from some nearby sites, I'm curious how useful having a 10Gbps local connection will actually turn out to be in practice. Being able to download Linux ISOs faster is the prominent use case that comes to mind.
We’ve had symmetrical 1gb fiber owned and installed by our public utilities for almost two decades here in central Washington. Was $80 a month until a year or two ago, then it went down to $60.
Just got gigabit in Knoxville for $65. Which is actually a tough sell since AT&T already offers 300 megabit for $55 and I’m not sure what I’d do with a faster connection. But $65 from AT&T would only get me 500 megabit, so for people who do want faster speeds the KUB option is looking good.
I have a 500 mbps and a 1 Gbps fiber into my home. For redundancy (WFH 100%) and because it's cheap (Romania).
The only time I notice which one I'm on is when I install games from gog/steam/psn. Even operating system isos (which are only a few gigs, not 50-100 G like modern games) don't make a dent any more. Streaming is a-ok, but I'm stuck in the last century with an 1080p TV.
Both of my providers^H^H^H one of my providers now offer 2.5 Gbps I think. And I wonder why :)
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I’ve had fiber at my house from day one provided by a local ISP. Comcast came in and buried their own fiber lines (years later) for all the houses in my neighborhood. Soon after, my ISP bumped my speed and lowered my monthly bill. We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices. Also, I will happily pay higher prices to never pay for Comcast again. So they won’t see a penny from…
> We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices. Unless it's a deep pocketed behemoth coming and stomping out local competition because they can afford to lose money on price dumping. Though I agree with the general idea of the competition.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
I really wish microeconomics was a required course in high school or primary. I find it to be one of the least understood of the well-established fields, and one that matters when we get older and vote or debate on these topics.
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I’ve had fiber at my house from day one provided by a local ISP. Comcast came in and buried their own fiber lines (years later) for all the houses in my neighborhood. Soon after, my ISP bumped my speed and lowered my monthly bill. We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices. Also, I will happily pay higher prices to never pay for Comcast again. So they won’t see a penny from…
> We desperately need more competition. It’s the only thing that actually lowers prices. Unless it's a deep pocketed behemoth coming and stomping out local competition because they can afford to lose money on price dumping. Though I agree with the general idea of the competition.
Usually when there is a deep-pocketed entity stomping out local competition they are using regulatory capture as their main tool (this is what Comcast seems to do) and the problem is competition has been made illegal.
In situations like this, my default assumption is that it is illegal to lay competing cables until proven otherwise. We had a similar situation of massive monopoly provider in Australia back in the early 2000s, the economics didn't stop new companies laying new cable to compete with the incumbents. That all died when the government launched a new national network though.
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There's more to a connection than speed, there might be data limits, there might be latency differences and it might just be unavailable or expensive. I'm not from the US, but if it's somewhat economically viable, go for the underdog.
In the US it’s also not uncommon for connections to be not only asymmetrical, but downright lopsided. Comcast sells “gigabit” in my area that’s 1.2Gbps down but only like 20Mbps up which is just silly. Thankfully a competitor offers true gigabit for about the same price, and so that’s what I subscribe to.
We’ve had symmetrical 1gb fiber owned and installed by our public utilities for almost two decades here in central Washington. Was $80 a month until a year or two ago, then it went down to $60.
Meanwhile over here in Bellevue, home of T-Mobile and (close enough) Microsoft, I’m stuck with Comcast or really crappy DSL. How is it that central WA gets way better internet than Bellevue? Oh right. Comcast lobbying.
Meanwhile I live 20 minutes from Google's heardquarters and I can't even get more than 25 Mbps uplink. Maybe these big internet companies should dig up all the infrastructure in their home turf and replace it?
You live here - you know that that the NIMBYs would never allow that. It took 20 years to run a power line to electrify Caltrain.
> Two decades later and the coalition just announced that 18 different ISPs now compete for Utah resident attention over a network that now covers 21 different Utah cities. In many instances, ISPs on the network are offering symmetrical (uncapped) gigabit fiber for as little as $45 a month (plus $30 network connection fee, so $75). Some ISPs are even offering symmetrical 10 Gbps fiber for around $150 a month: Congrat…