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Comment by sametmax | Hacker News Reader

I'm kinda of amazed of the Internet and mobile situation in the US. I was in the Silicon Valley recently. Internet was terrible everywhere I went. Phone plans were incredibly expensive.

While my French phone plan, that I pay $25 a month, gave me unlimited calls and text messages, even in the US, and from France to the US or vice versa. On top of unlimited 4G in my country, I had 25Go of free 3G in the US for my trip. And it was faster than any Wifi I connected to: hotel, work, restaurant...

How is that possible that I was next to Cupertino and Mountain View, yet witnessed this ? This is supposed to be the super tech region of the world, yet it felt nothing like that.

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That’s how awful cell carrier oligopoly is here. Wired internet is even worse, even in Silicon Valley. I have the choice of Comcast 100mbit Internet (used to be ~20mbit a few years ago) for ~$80 USD per month or nothing. Literally my only real high-speed choice is Comcast in every apartment I’ve rented in the Bay Area in the past 6 years. Many friends are in the same situation.

Think about that: ISPs in the US are so firmly entrenched, so highly organized and with such strong lobbies that even in the Bay Area it’s awful.

I want to believe that this will change, but I’ll bwlieve it when I see it. Google tried, and it looks like they’re scaling down their expectations for G Fiber rollouts. Wireless likely can’t work without some quantum leap in the tech, and the infra costs for a buildout are MASSIVE (on the order of tens-hundreds of billions for a nation wide network) plus you need permits for every eyesore tower that every city will individually fight you on. These are just some of the reasons that all the people and all the money in the valley can’t fix US ISPs.

Eh, it's not THAT bad. Back when I had T-mobile I had > 100 mbit/s LTE and worldwide (albeit slow outside of Canada or Mexico) data roaming for $50

I also still have 250 mbit/s internet with Comcast for $50 (slow upload though)

Keep in mind that the salary in silicon valley tends to be a lot higher, so those $50 are equivalent to $25 of what I had back in Germany.

That being said: It's true that the competition really doesn't seem to work all that great. It's not completely horrible though. I'm happier than with what I had in Germany.

Just to add insult to injury: Don't forget your French sim works without roaming across all EU member states

On the other hand there are countries like Luxembourg, where cellular data service in the middle of the capital is horrible. The guy in Orange shop who sold me a sim card said I might need to manually switch from 4G to 3G in some areas, because the reception is so bad. And it was bad pretty much everywhere, even on 3G.

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