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Comment by delcaran | Hacker News Reader

I'm in Italy, 15km from the province capital, 7km from a major turistic village, in a village of 3000 souls. I'm waiting for 2Mbps ADSL since 2007.

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Where do you live? (I'm Italian as well). Mobile connections aside, there are some vendors who would reach you through WiFi if you're in line of sight with any of their repeaters. (eolo.it and alternatyva.it came to mind, but there are others). In 2009 I brought a whoppy 4DL/4UL connection (with a really low latency excellent for online gaming) to a house in a rural area where the only available option would have been a 57k analog modem. Now there are much faster solutions.

Also, don't trust the national provider Telecom Italia. Before finding that solution, we pestered them with requests to cover that area, and their canned response has always been "we're working on it", while actually they were waiting for more people to move in that area so that it would have been more convenient for them.

Province of Udine. Yes, Eolo has been my provider for the last 10 years, I was one of the earliest adopters in the province. The service has always been good, but worsening in the last 2 years due to too many contracts been sold without improving the infrastructure. IE, during the lockdown I had to rely on the 4G network (even checking email was not possible through Eolo) and somedays I still have troubles.

If I may, which provider offers you 4DL/4UL and how much does it costs?

The 4UL/4DL was an offer by Alternatyva.it back then. I don't recall the costs, but they were comparable, although a bit higher, to a wired ADSL. They kept it until Telecom Italia finally covered that area with faster ADSL, which if memory serves had been 5 or 6 years later.

I seem to remember we had to settle to a 4/4 setup although the contract allowed a bit more DL speed, due to the distance from the only repeater we had in line of sight. Performance was good during day and very good from evening, with speed tests around or very near the theoretical maximum.

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