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Comment by nickvanw | Hacker News Reader

Parts of the US are catching up, but it is distributed very unequally (and often much more expensive).

Anecdotally, I moved into a newish (~5 year old) apartment building in Seattle and had my choice of three ISPs that each provided symmetrical gigabit for around $60/month, delivered via an Ethernet jack in a low-voltage cabinet in my closet.

Getting it wired up took one phone call, wherein my switch port was activated remotely and I could grab an IP address and start using the internet. IPv6 via DHCPv6-PD and everything else worked without a charm.

On the other hand, where I live in (also Seattle) is served by exactly one ISP via DOCSIS, providing 1000/35 but nothing more. It can vary block by block here unfortunately.

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In my neck of the woods, it's all about competition (or that lack there of). I went from 100mbps down for $130 to 300mbps down for $60. What changed? A new ISP in town offering 1 gbps for $100.

If we wanted what other countries have for internet, then what we need is to make the lines public and have ISPs rent them from the government. The reason ISPs can create these duopolies is because every new company has to invest a LOT of money to lay down new data lines. If a company already has their cable/phone lines in place then boom, captured market.

Rentable public data lines would make the cost of setting up new ISPs a LOT cheaper.

I had the same issue ("1000/35" with Xfinity but in reality it was barely 10/1) but keep checking because CenturyLink is regularly bringing fiber to new areas. For the same price I can get 1000/1000 symmetric now.

CenturyLink wired my entire neighborhood a number of years ago, but it looks like _before_ my house was built, and they haven't come back since.

All of my neighboring blocks have 1g/1g from them, but the most they offer at my address is a 40/40 "fiber-based coax" internet that I'm probably not even wired for. I would love for that to change - my DOCSIS internet has been pretty solid, but I miss the gigabit upload.

can I ask which Seattle area ISP offers IPv6 via DHCPv6-PD

Definitely!

Wave G (NOT Wave's coax-based DOCSIS that they bought years ago) offers/offered IPv6 via PD, lots of documentation for it around the internet: https://gist.github.com/dmtucker/cf3f241cf002367825633c988ff... (this isn't me).

I haven't been a Wave G customer in a number of years, but I don't anticipate it's changed since ~2018

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