It cannot be understated how badly the more rural parts of the country are being screwed by big telecom right now.
LOL. My mom lives in an older house in a formerly-rural area where she's now surrounded by suburb-style new development. She wanted cable internet, and it cost her about $8000 and endless hours of haranguing Cox and chasing down service vans just to get a hook up. Literally she would see a Cox van at a construction site and stop and ask the person, because no one would talk to her on the phone. She eventually found one guy who gave her his business card and cell number, and knew a few people in the construction department who would help. The woman who took her credit card number over the phone to charge for the service told her she knew absolutely nothing about the process, and could make no guarantees about when it would happen. My mom was so desperate, she gave her her credit card number anyway. It took nearly a year to run maybe 100 yards of cable down her driveway from the street to her house, but she finally does have broadband now.
I’m going to guess that 80% of the US can’t get that.
The actual bandwidth used by a 300M customer and a 1000M customer is usually the same. The provider's upstream contracts would not change much if they put every one of their customers on 1000M.
But their pricing is regulated. The arm and a leg they charge for 1000M service is largely a function of that regulation, even though it hardly affects their costs otherwise. You might think that if the infrastructure costs are the same for 1M or 1000M and that the infrastructure costs are 90% of all costs, 1M and 1000M could be priced within 25% of each other. It might seem that a price jump from $100/50M to $1000/1000M is unreasonable. But the U.S. government right now is handing out $billions to rural providers to build out fiber, then requiring them to charge ridiculously high prices.
Correct. I have a gig/gig symmetrical connection and a family of four information-devouring people. In the last 30 days we used 1 TB of data... which is to say, an average of just over 3Mb/s. We probably peaked at about 600Mb/s a few times.
This is asymmetric with no disclaimer on their advertising page from an entrenched local monopoly in the north east (a small one)
It’s a weird situation. Windstream lies to the federal government and says they offer broadband to my area, when they don’t offer any service at all. The only actual provider (South Slope), which offers fiber elsewhere, is therefore shut out of the usual federal programs to finance upgrades to the completely antiquated and over-provisioned DSL lines. I’m 3 miles line of sight from their headquarters.
My parents live in the near Chicago suburbs, have 1 choice for high speed Internet, and pay $80/month for 100Mbps down and 6Mbps up.
So, rural internet options are actually better than urban in some areas.