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Comment by jyrkesh | Hacker News Reader

I'm in a combo CenturyLink / Comcast market, and it's AMAZING what competition between even just those two firms does to my offerings. Switched from Comcast's $90/mo gigabit with a 1 TB data cap and only 90 Mb/s upload to CenturyLink's $60/mo symmetric gigabit with no data cap. I have a contract-less "lifetime price guarantee", they did free install (which included running a fiber line from the pole to my house with a cherrypicker), and threw in a free fiber endpoint box (I don't know what it's really called) and a modem/router that's actually pretty good.

I get 980 Mb/s up/down with a 1ms ping in speed tests. Games are amazing, downloads are amazing, hosting files to myself is amazing...all it takes is a little competition.

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> free fiber endpoint box (I don't know what it's really called)

That would be an Optical Network Terminal, or ONT

If you have no contract, what's to stop CenturyLink from reneging on the lifetime price guarantee?

nothing but competition

I wonder why we are stuck with these options (in the town referenced in the post): 1gbps Comcast and 40mbps CenturyLink.

Colorado has laws that give monopolies on the infrastructure to whoever owns it. But in order to get around anti-trust laws (or for some other cynical reason), so in your case, there is really only one provider, but they share their infrastructure with their competition and throttle them to nothing. So your options are "whatever comcast offers" and "whatever comcast decides CenturyLink can offer"

I don't understand. Comcast has their own infrastructure: a bunch of coax in the ground. Century Link (previously known as: QWest, USWest, and Ma Bell) has their own: Cat-3 coppter in the ground.

DSL/Telephone copper line has physical limits to the bandwidth it can provide. It can't do anything close to gigabit and plummets very quickly with distance from the telco box.

Lots and lots and lots of regional lobbying.

"threw in a free fiber endpoint box (I don't know what it's really called)"

PON ONU. Memorable, it isn't.

Make sure you do your speedtest to a server beyond CenturyLink.

My speeds were about that to the CenturyLink data center, but anything outside that was slower than Comcast 150 Mbps.

Which leads me to believe they don't have a fat enough pipe to the internet in my area.

Which was too bad, because the $60/mo price was a deal

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