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Comment by lmilcin | Hacker News Reader

I live in Poland and I am BAFFLED at how bad internet in US, supposedly one of the most developed countries on Earth, is.

I have commercial (ie high priority), 600Mbit/120Mbit broadband with extremely stable (under 15ms, over 99% of th time) round trip to most of the Poland, for equivalent of 20 USD per month.

I know its not the same everywhere in Poland, but consider I also have three mobile internet plans. One of them is 4G limited to 20Mbit but unlimited monthly transfer, for 5 USD per month. This is also quite stable and allows me to comfortably work remotely from almost every place in Poland and serves me as a backup link.

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So Poland has two things going for it:

(1) Poland is a LOT smaller than the United States. It's not much bigger than the state of Wyoming, yet it has more than 60x the population. That makes building infrastructure a lot cheaper and more profitable.

(2) The US had the Internet FIRST. That's not an advantage when it comes to infrastructure. For example, England had roads hundreds of years before the US did, so roads in the United States are quite a bit better. Rome had running water (of a sort) a long time before most anywhere else but I'll bet its water situation today is quite a bit worse on average than most of the United States.

1. I am tired of hearing this rehashed over and over again. Yes, overall density in US is lower than most countries in Europe, but even high density places like New Jersey still have plenty of spots with only one, overpriced, shitty provider. For example, I am paying $98/mo for 400/40mbps cable, and that's my only wired option. My dad's country side house at the foothills of the Romanian Carpathian mountains gets 900/450mbps FTTH service for $10/mo. 2. Back in the late 90s, both Romania and my NJ neighborhood were at the same point, twisted copper phone lines and cable TV service over coax cable. Yet 20+ years later, the differences are stark. Don't get me started on cell phone service :)

That explanation is even more strange if you figure out nothing of the infrastructure from 20 years ago still exists that could explain the difference. Every single active or passive network element must have been changed when technology evolved, likely multiple times.

I have a better explanation, and it is just greedy companies that invest absolute minimum into infrastructure, oversubscribe their internet access and pioneered worst possible customer service just because the customers have no other option.

I think you point 2 is much better than point 1.

There are parts of the US that have similar or higher population density to poland or other european countries. There are no reason they cant get as good internet. Not all ISP's have to cover the entire country.

Tangential, but I remember a tour guide at the Colosseum saying they could flood the floor of the arena for “naval” shows in less time than it would take you to flush the toilet twice in many apartments in the city today. Unsure how accurate that was, but impressive description.

I live in Poland and I am BAFFLED at how bad ________ in US.

You could replace that with a lot of things unfortunately. If you put "and expensive" at the end, it would probably be just as correct.

it’s not baffling. we decided to glamorize billionaires rather than the amazing country we could have had if we’d stopped at millionaires as the height of (economic) status and reasonable wealth accumulation. a billionaire simply cannot allocate capital as efficiently as a thousand millionaires, so we choke on our own collective greed.

namely healthcare. it's an absolute disaster if you have to do anything beyond the simple "annual health examinations."

I literally hate going to the doctor because the various billing departments are often nightmares to deal with.

I literally haven't been to the doctor in four years, because the last time I went in for an X-ray they charged me immediately, and then later sent a bill for some more charges on the same X-ray.

My insurance and medical provider are the same entity, which I thought was supposed to avoid this exact situation.

Now I just avoid any medical treatment unless it is completely unavoidable, because I have absolutely no trust that the costs won't just be suddenly upgraded afterwords.

And that’s with insurance. Imagine how it is without. Though I think most Americans could learn a lot about the importance of taking care of themselves better by going without insurance for a while. It tends to drive a healthier lifestyle IME.

Compared to say South Korea or Singapore , Poland could be considered poor.

It is not just developed economies /rich countries only either. I have 1 GBps Fiber for roughly 20 USD a month in Bangalore, India .

Population density has a lot to do with internet speeds more than anything else, EU has roughly half the size and double the population.

How bad is it really? I get that there are rural and outlier areas but the average bandwidth is higher in the US than Poland. Maybe I just find it hard to relate, but I and most of the heavily populated areas of the North East have had symmetrical FTTH for 15 years now. We have Gigabit up and down for about $90 USD a month.

Many millions have poor internet connections: https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2019/04/08/its-tim...

If you drive out of a populated area across the US, nearly all of it is very sparsely populated, and therefore has terrible internet. 18% of Americans live in these areas, and that’s 54 million people. That’s a lot of frustrated individuals! Even in more populated rural areas like Ohio, you might get cable (but not fiber) to the nearest village, but even a half mile out of town, it’s only DSL (6mbps down on a good day).

Average bandwidth isn't a good metric of internet access.

A community that has 1 home with 1Gb/s and 10 homes with 5Mb/s would have an average speed of about (1000 + (10*5))/11 = 95 Mb/s, which is accurate but misleading

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