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Comment by woudsma | Hacker News Reader

$240 per month for internet, wow. I didn't realise things were that expensive for people living in remote areas.

I'm currently paying ~$40 (converted from EUR) per month for a 100Mb/s fiber connection.

We pay 180 USD a month for a phone line and DSL from Century Link. This connection is 1.5 mbps down and 500 kbps up in practice (advertised speeds are higher). Starlink has been a game changer for us.

> 180 USD

Damn... hope your wages make up for this man.

It's crazy, in a lot of rural areas ISPs know they can charge the moon for terrible service and they justify it by saying how hard it is to service remote locations... at least for some 4G is a new alternative that is more readily available than Starlink.

CHF 64.75 (~71 USD) per month for 25 gbit synchronous [1] here in Zürich, Switzerland. The cost now is hardware. The Fiber infrastructure in the city is mostly operated by the state electrical company. Anyone can provide service over it.

[1] https://www.init7.net/en/

[2] https://www.speedtest.net/result/c/df4123cf-5f0e-40f2-bf71-f...

25Gb ?! Symmetric? Wow.

I guess that's a benefit to a small relatively wealthy country?

My question would be, what do you have to even _use_ that much bandwidth? I have 1Gb/50Mb asymmetric and my Ubiquiti router can't really saturate the down stream. Sure, I could invest in a more powerful router, but in normal daily use we never even get close to max bandwidth.

It's only the city and places that got lucky enough to have been connected via Fiber by the state owned phone company. There are still areas with garbage connections at a high cost.

The reason the city has such a good fiber connectivity is because of a vote a few years ago that pushed this. It cost a lot of money but was worth every bit IMO.

I hope something like this gets pushed for the whole country. I see it as core infrastructure like electricity and unlike cable or copper it is way more future proof.

https://broadbandnow.com/national-broadband-map is informative.

Select max speed and then go zoom in somewhere rural and see "1Mbps to 25Mbps" and then switch over to min price or provider counts...

There aren't a lot of options in rural areas and running wire to the spot is expensive.

That's because it's not. The cost isn't $240 by necessity. They're knowingly overpaying for Internet access (they have multiple connections, they're not even using Starlink for example).

I'm paying $34 / month in a small city in the middle of nowhere for 200mbps in the US.

$140/month to get the most upload bandwidth possible at my house (35 Mbps through Spectrum).

Then $99/month for Starlink (for now, at least).

Meanwhile a few blocks away a friend has 500 Mbps symmetric access for $50/month.

Time to build a wireless link to your friend :)

Seriously though this is achievable with consumer hardware[0], as long as you have line-of-sight or close enough to it.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/TP-Link-300Mbps-dual-polarized-direct...

And check out Ubiquiti and Mikrotik for more hardware that does this sort of thing.

Yeah most of my experience is from Ubiquiti and Mikrotik about 10 years ago. I was going to recommend Ubiquiti but it looks like the bar (and price) is even lower now.

@geerlingguy that would be a great video idea if possible

How is 5G or LTE service in your area?

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