Every ISP Is Trying to Scare You Into Paying for Internet You Don't Need | Hacker News Reader

Every ISP Is Trying to Scare You Into Paying for Internet You Don't Need

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61 pointsvaksel35 comments

This actually makes me sad.

Most consumers don't even get to choose anything over 1mbps in India. 512kbps speeds is the norm (which is also like $22 per month in Mumbai - where I'm based. $22 for 512kbps!)

On top of that, bandwidth capping and other such practices is still the norm in India! A lot of ISPs don't allow you anything over 4gb or 6gb of bandwidth per month!

Oh what I would give to see a chart by an Indian ISP that starts with minimum speeds of 1.5mbps!

Yeah, it is a couple of years behind the state-of-the-art, but the main reason is beacuase of how TRAI defined broadband (Always on connection with minimum download speed of 256 kbps). If they increase the threshold, I think the ISPs will catch up.

From what I have observed, the ISPs (or the telcos) in India are a lot better (in the 'dont-be-evil' point of view) than their US counterparts. I have used Airtel and BSNL broadband services for many years and both of them worked perfectly well without any glitches at all. I cannot comment on BSNLs, but the Airtel customer service is very good too. I may be wrong here.

I am using a 256Kbps connection for some time now. It is more than enough for my humble needs. So cannot complain. Viewing videos and all is a pain though.

I am using 1.5 mbps down/500kbps up, at the place I am staying for a couple of months in Bangalore. It is good enough for most of my work. I can't do multi-party video conferencing, but I don't _have_ to have that to do my work.

But, yes it is a step down from the 100 mbps line at home, but it isn't 60 times better at home, but it feels maybe 5-10 times better. The worst is probably the uneven service. It drops quite a lot (sometimes several times an hour) and you often have to wait for minutes for it to come back up again, not to talk about the powercuts. If this place didn't have a backup generator things would be dire.

In Afghanistan, Internet was only really available on a couple bases. Our's (U.S.) offered troops 56K to your plywood shack for $35/mo and it had about 50% uptime. After a year of that, pretty much all domestic Internet connections rock. I empathize with your plight, albeit over a shorter amount of time.

Ouch! $22/month for 512 kbps? I pay about $15/month for 30 mbps and at this point couldn't imagine living without it. Downloading big updates, videos, game demos, you name it, and by the time you're done naming it you're almost done downloading it...

EDIT: To clarify, I get that in Redmond, WA. Definitely have a serious advantage there.

In which country?

It's worth remembering that this is an issue even in the US, too! Until about a year ago my house in rural New York was stuck on dial-up. (We now thankfully have 10mbps DSL.)

I live in fairly urban US, about two miles from a major pipeline with so much bandwidth that attempting to describe it would only show my lack of networking knowledge.

My university has spent thousands of man-hours throttling student bandwidth use (to 30GB/mo). Right now we're using less than half of the bandwidth we pay for.

:-(

How's this: $40/month for 1500kbps (With a 2GB! download allowance. and excess downloads charged at 15c per MB after that!)

http://www.bigpond.com/internet/plans/adsl/plans-and-offers/

* That's about $36USD

Bigpond ain't to bad now if your willing to pay a premium, 30mbps and 100gb download on cable for $140

Did you see the point below about $15/mo in Redmond for 30mbps/Unlimited. (When you are paying 10x as much for a service it can leave a bitter taste in your mouth)

That being said - I am getting tempted to suck-up my disdain for Telstra/BP and sign up for 30mbps cable.

You think that's bad? I'm in Jordan, and I'm paying 70USD/Month for 2mbps/512kbps down/up ADSL with a 10GB monthly cap. Each additional GB is another 7.5 USD.

(downloads after 10pm and before 7am are cap-free)

You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

Reminds me of the days of streaming video over my 56K modem with Realplayer and downloading a full CD from Napster over the course of an hour. That was the future. Today's kids with their 1080p YouTube videos and 2GB game demos. grumble grumble

And yes, I'm 27 :P

Various speeds of modems didn't really seem to make a huge difference for me. It wasn't until I went to a LAN party at a friend's house with cable. Since I could download music at 18kBps I could actually listen to it as it downloaded! That meant I didn't have to waste all that time downloading something I didn't like.

What would be next? Radio on the internet? video? The world changed for me that day.

Anybody else here remember trashing their handset-cradle 300 baud Kansas City modem for one of them there shiny new 1200 baud Hayes machines? And now they tell me that ten thousand or so times faster ain't enough?

I remember trashing a parallel port (or was it a serial port....) trying to get a modem to work, and having to replace with a new card.

Kids these days with their whiffy and Ethernet ports.

1200 baud would be just fine if I could read the news without an unwanted megabyte of bloat per page (even worse with pagination).

300 baud??? You had it lucky, I used to use a 110 baud teletype.

We would have killed for 110 baud. We had a three baud modem and had to carry all the 1 bits by hand.

3 baud? Luxury.

We had 1 baud and we kept it in a box in the middle of the road. Every day we'd get up, clean the box, read the bit, and then go to the factory to work for 20 hours. And when we got home every night our father would cut us with a knife.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

Merry Christmas!

And when you tell that to the young people today, they don't believe you!

The content/applications for network usage in those days weren't too bad at 300 or 1200 baud. Mostly text or small binaries. Lots of single user stuff too. Today it's not uncommon for a family to have multiple computers and other devices that can access the Internet. If everyone is interested in doing streaming video I'd say 10-15Mbit/sec is a realistic minimum.

Do you remember how long it took to move a compressed Apple ][ disk over the lines with ASCII Express? Hours! And that disk was only 140K!

Good lord. In the UK I get 24Mbit DSL (giving me effectively ~12Mbit speeds) for about £8 per month after a rebate offer. Is it that expensive in the US due to lack of competition, or just the sheer size of the areas you have to cover?

Depends. Some areas have little competition. Telcos are being pushed to extend DSL to more and more rural areas, which adds a whole lot of cost for very little ROI, simply due to low population density. That drives costs up.

Telcos actually make out like bandits on rural DSL, often getting 300-400% subsidies from the Universal Service Funds. I have a friend who has about 400 rural broadband subscribers and he said he charges $30/month, collects $150/month per customer from the USF, and was also given a $1,000 installation fee from the USF. He has long-since covered hist cost on installing a small DSLAM and running fiber out to that area.

In my rural area Verizon stopped adding new DSLAM capacity shortly after rolling out service, and refuses to add more despite a deep waiting list of new customers. Instead, they are focusing on adding FiOS to areas which are already well-serviced by both DSL and cable, and trying to stop the county government from running it's own fiber.

So, I pay $60 a month for a Sprint 3G connection thats run at about 1mbps for my home network.

Business internet is far worse. Qwest DSL is $55.50/mo for 1.5 Mbps down.

People don't want to wait. And many people are used to using their browser to access a corporate LAN and usually pretty fat pipes to the 'net. And when advertisements are increasingly large flash files...

Sure, the "concert tickets" line is funny, but I don't see this as wholly unreasonable.

Paying $100/month for 50mbps boost. Drops to 30-40mbps after a minute or two. Using Comcast, living in south San Jose.

Hmmm, why are US lines so expensive? I'm on a 20Mbps/1Mbps line for 20 EUR ($29) per month (NL).

20mbps up speed is essencial are you kidding? At 10mbps (approx) I have three people online at the same time.

1 playing on facebook 2 playing twitch-based video games online (twitch mechanics = it is important to know exactly where the other player is because you are avoiding his bullets or fireball or whatever, WoW is not twitch based, counterstrike is)

None of the 3 people experience anything less than perfect service, all running on the same router.

I live on a peninsula in the Sydney city area - we get about 5.5-6mbps here because geographically the cables have to run around the (small) bay and back to the CBD. And its plenty enough.

Meanwhile all the content providers are trying to squeeze as much content per KB into their streams as they can.

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