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Comment by arenaninja | Hacker News Reader

That's nice for Chicago, and Austin, but what about LA, Houston, etc.?

I pay $75/month for 150Mbps via Comcast... and most days a speed test will say around half of that, and there's infrequent outages (averaging roughly one every month).

The only other service where I live is AT&T: 18Mbps for $50/month. And whatever you may think of Comcast, my experience with AT&T's service and customer service has been far, far worse.

This loss of competition hurts consumers

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I pay $63.25 for a 2M/256K rural WISP connection, and i'm in a county with 500,000 people. In fact, i'm only 4 miles south of Madison, WI city limits.. I live in a neighborhood of 100 homes. I would kill for a 10M connection, and more than 2M up..

Should add, ATT has said on their website for the last 9 years that DSL is available at my house.. I sign up once a year, to have a guy 2 days later say its a mistake, and neighborhood is too far from the CO. I have been told 4 times to get a petition around the neighborhood, but of course, the people at the call center can't tell me what to do with that petition, or where to send it, etc. so its just to get me off the phone.

So fed up, and needing to start working from home soon, that I'm moving in a few months..

I wonder if you can get regulators involved here. I know internet is still relatively lightly regulated compared to the phone network, but AT&T has been willingly refusing to do new non-Uverse DSL installs the past couple years.

If you can document that DSL was once available at your house or that your neighbors still have it, you might be able to get somewhere.

Oh I'm not saying it is good for users, only that it isn't entirely bad for Google. I want them to succeed and crush Comcast / AT&T. As a consumer of internet service, who doesn't want that? Those companies are terrible.

That being said, the other wildcard (that another user did mention) is whenever SpaceX gets all of the spectrum / permits for their internet microsat constellation, it will happen. That will most likely be a few years out at best, but when it happens, no doubt it will be a good option (LEO Sats have a lot better ping times than existing Satellite based internets).

Edited to mention that it is SpaceX working on a Satellite internet constellation not Tesla (thanks: nickjarboe for the cluebat).

I believe it's SpaceX not Tesla that is investigating an internet microsat constellation, but if the Tesla/Solar City merger goes through, you could be right in the long term.

Sorry you're entirely right. Let me rephrase to say:

Musk Industries's satellite internet constellation. Original post updated with credit to you.

Just to be clear, Google Fiber in Austin is more marketing than reality. A small area of town has it--most do not. And while the other players have now introduced fiber, their coverage is also limited to select neighborhoods.

So, I don't agree that it's nice for Austin. This removes the incentive for the other providers to continue expanding coverage, and the core of the city will likely be stuck on the old cable lines for much, much longer.

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