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Comment by bfuller | Hacker News Reader

When I worked for century link briefly their customers barely got above dial-up speeds. In fact many were using dial up (this was probably almost a decade ago)

Line attentuation can be a huge problem because a lot of rural homes are far down dirt roads away from infrastructure.

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I always hated the CenturyLink brand. It makes me think of covered wagons: "linking you to Internet access the way your grandpappy liked it."

Story time: I worked at a CLEC in the late 90s, and my entry there was in tech support. People would call in and literally scream at me that they couldn't get better that 26.4Kbps from their dialup even though they lived in a brand new subdivision full of expensive houses, so it was obviously due to our incompetence. I'd patiently explain that rather than running new lines to their new lots, SWB had installed a pair gain, and no modem was going to get decent connections through that beast. The sheer fury these customers would direct at SWB after I told them was an awesome and terrifying thing to behold.

CL here (major coastal city) offers most non apartment complexes symmetric gigabit fiber. They are still running a free install/modem deal too. Pain in the butt to run power for their ONT box but I'm sitting at $65/month flat rate for gigabit with zero downtime since install 3 months ago.

My other option is Comcast but for anything over a 20mb upload speed I'd be paying over $240. Even their fiber doesn't get above 20mb up, last I checked, without reaching a pricier package.

Interesting tidbit: Apparently ~2% of households with internet still used dial-up as of November 2019.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/185532/us-household-dial...

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