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Comment by rolleiflex | Hacker News Reader

> The internet is lousy in Turkey

Um, what? I just signed up for fiber in Istanbul, lowest plan, 25mbit, at dirt cheap $11 a month — unmetered. Meanwhile my San Francisco apartment, Comcast charges me $67 a month for a 50mbit capped one.

While there is some variance in availability (just like any other country) Turkish infrastructure is generally first-world. It is for political reasons that it gets demoted into the second, but ultimately we’re talking about a place with a $25k~ GDP PPP per person [1]. That’s more than Greece’s, and climbing towards Italy’s.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/turkey/gdp-per-capita-ppp

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I go to Turkey regularly and I always had a very good bandwidth on 4g, even in the middle of nowhere in Anatolia. The network is much, much better than here in France. I guess the geography of Turkey helps a lot there since they usually always have a good vantage point to put antenna.

I don't know why people in this thread seem to think that Turkey is a poor developing country. It's not. Even with the recent political issues and the economical crisis, it is much better than a lot of country in Europe and in the EU.

I think many people here genuinely don’t have much of an understanding of what they’re talking about most of the time, and you just catch it for the things that you personally know about. Makes you think about what one misses and takes as fact based on comments because you don’t about other topics.

Also, good LTE availability is also probably because it’s easy to place towers on top of flats legislatively speaking, and due to ruthless competition between three carriers.

> I don't know why people in this thread seem to think that Turkey is a poor developing country.

In the EU, there is a lot of prejudice against Turkish people because of the decades of immigration. Think of how most Americans stereotype Mexico and Mexican people, and that's roughly how many people in the EU regard Turkey.

In the US people don't really know anything about Turkey, aside from a vague idea that it's "middle eastern". Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if a huge percentage of Americans think Turkey is all deserts and they speak Arabic.

Istanbul isn't the whole country and it is a huge place. The sibling comment mentions Antalya, another large city. Both are going to have ok internet. Ergodan has done well to support the rural population where internet service is lousy. And that is only one aspect of having a self contained system.

Arguing over internet speeds when it comes to choosing a system for kids to learn programming on was by far weakest argument. I should have just removed it, as it was a straggler that was going to die anyway.

The sibling comment mentioned Anatolia (almost the whole part of Turkey that is on the asian continent), not Antalya, the city.

I've been to most parts of Turkey and I can say the Internet infra in smaller cities are actually better than the bigger ones. Especially the cellular/LTE network (I use Turkcell).

You rarely have dead zones between cities and most towns but the Internet sometimes downgrades to 3G or Edge if you're in a super rural area.

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