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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

There are plenty of ISPs in the United States. I get 500 Mbps internet from a provider not on this list, despite being the sixth largest provider in the country and operating in ten different states.

You may not realize how many there are total because most of them are regional. Things like Spectrum or Charter or Verizon or Cox or CenturyLink are all broadband carriers that were never available where I am, so I only heard about them through others online. Meanwhile, neither you nor this announcement mentioned my ISP.

As many of those are not part of this inquiry, presumably the FTC is not worried about the privacy practices of those ISPs at this time, and just targeting ones it has specific concerns about.

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There are not plenty of ISPs for 99% of people in the US. You have one provider, maybe 2 if you’re lucky, and if you’re really lucky one will offer an uncapped symmetrical fiber connection. But that’s not the case for 99% of people.

I live in the Bay Area - my options are shitty Comcast for $66 for 60Mbps or $50 for 18Mbps from AT&T. I live in a building with 75+ units. Imagine that. My parents in a third world country have far more options, with better speeds (including Fiber) and far cheaper options too.

> my options are shitty Comcast for $66 for 60Mbps or $50 for 18Mbps from AT&T.

So sonic.net doesn't service your area? They were a great CLEC/ISP when I was in the bay area, mostly carried over AT&T lines so you could get it anywhere AT&T did DSL.

It's irrelevant if you can only get 18Mbps. I pay Comcast $95 to get 150 or 250 down, internet only, because ATT and Sonic can only get me 40.

Thankfully, ATT just rolled fiber down my street last week, and I was on Sonic's preorder list the day after they announced it for my neighborhood. No timeframe, but I'm ecstatic to be using a local ISP again, not to mention symmetric gigabit with no caps for half of what comcast charges me.

Consider yourself lucky.

When I lived in Chicago, the building I was in with almost 700 units the only choice for internet was AT&T DSL which struggled to get to 3 Mbps, simply because the wiring in the building was old.

I know a business in Chicago that has to do everything on tethered cell phone connections because the phone lines are too old to handle DSL, and the cable company won’t run a line across the street to their factory.

Moving to the Bay Area, I was surprised to find such limited ISPs given that the Bay is home to SV and its neighbors. I don't know what I expected, but I certainly didn't expect it to be as limited as it is here.

Moved from Bay Area to North Carolina, not even one of the "major" metro areas. Everyone has great internet

The point being made was that there are plenty of ISPs not named by this order. You're off on a tangent.

Yes, I misinterpreted the comment. After being frustrated by lack of any decent internet almost everywhere, I have a knee jerk response to the words “plenty of ISPs”. You can go all the way from coast to coast and still have to choose being abused by either Comcast/Verizon/ATT/Centurylink/Spectrum/Charter.

Comcast, Charter, ATT, Verizon, CenturyLink, Cox are the biggest 6.

The only other two that have much more than a million customers are Altice and Frontier. I think you can argue that those 8 server nearly every American.

My bad. Apparently WOW bills itself as the "sixth largest cable provider" as of Dec. 31, 2018, which presumably means not including fiber and DSL and the like: https://ir.wowway.com/investor-relations/overview/default.as...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_broadband_providers_in...

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