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Comment by gbba | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone is so fortunate to have 1GB/s internet.

Waiting for a page to load is a terrible user experience.

Outside of a select few cities, getting anything more than 100 mbps down is literally impossible unless you have the budget to pay a company to run fiber to your home (at least tens or hundreds of thousands). And outside of major cities, 10 mbps might be the best you can get.

Not to mention there are a thousand situations even inside of the major cities where a few mbps (if that) is all you can muster.

I for one hate pages that take minutes to load... and it happens a lot more than you’d hope.

...in the US? Here in Europe I’m paying 30 euro/month for 200 megabit down (just 20 up, though), and I live in a 50k people town.

Even in London I think some places only get 10Mbps

I'm getting 32 mbps from BT for £52.49. My O2 mobile internet hardly works at all. London really has terrible internet infrastructure. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some people got no more than 10 mbps as you say.

> London really has terrible internet infrastructure.

I think it probably has average infrastructure shared over too many connections. If I do 4G speed tests up north, it's always way faster but there's also way fewer people trying to use it concurrently...

>I think it probably has average infrastructure shared over too many connections.

Which makes it indistinguishable from terrible infrastructure :)

More people sharing the infrastructure also means more people paying for it. So in terms of value for money London's internet infrastructure is terrible even by your very lenient definition.

My old place was getting 12-16Mbps over ADSL despite being only 400yds from the exchange. Fibre improved that slightly to 20-25Mbps.

(New place has 1Gbps fibre - average is about 300-350Mbps during peak times, 800Mbps+ in quiet times.)

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