I just got a notice in the mail that my ISP is "upgrading" their network so now I can pay $200 USD/month to get a whopping 2gbps, which I actually thought was pretty amazing until I read your post. So, thanks.
In all seriousness, congrats! You made a good case for why one would need that much bandwidth. Also, we need to catch up here. :)
My local ISP trenched fiber to my house for free and provides gig internet for $80/month.
The funny thing is my previous house was in town and I had to settle for 100Mbit for the same price. ISPs are all sorts of messed up.
In the city it’s often just as easy to let what is working continue “working” - a major rollout takes a lot of money.
(I'm on Comcast's Business service, $250/mo for 1000/35 [long dumb story why]. Most of the time I see under 600 down when checking on speed test sites, and real-world speeds downloading large files rarely exceeds 250. I expect real-world speeds on the non-business service are even worse.)
It's pretty embarrassing that this is the state of things.
Over in Oakland I am paying $40/mo to Sonic for 10Gbps (though I only have equipment to route at 1Gbps at the moment)
There's a benchmark posted there showing that the speed is really as advertised.
gnpUSD = {'USA': 21,650,000,000,000, 'THA': 491,910,000,000} #4th quarter 2021
pop = {'USA': 329,000,000, 'THA': 70,000,000} #as of 2021
gnp['USA'] // pop['USA'] 65805
gnp['THA'] // pop['THA'] 7027
Seems more like a distribution of resources issue... so why not jack up taxes on the wealthiest 1% and use it to pay for things like high-speed fiber in all the rural areas? Doubtless this would lead to economic growth?
Throwing more money at it usually makes that kind of problem WORSE not better.
> "The Rural Electrification Act of 1936, enacted on May 20, 1936, provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve isolated rural areas of the United States. The funding was channeled through cooperative electric power companies, hundreds of which still exist today. (wiki)"
However there are just as many places where the state's government was bought off to ban such networks because the majors are afraid of actual competition.
It’s mostly been ineffective.
---
footnote here: official income record of thai people/businesses does not really reflect reality. Lots of entities are kind of off-system.
I prefer to order grab of around 120-200 baht from a "healthy" place or going for restaurants within Central 200-400 baht per meal.
It's like a typical consumer in the US spending $500+ per month for broadband. Even worse if you consider the rural income factor. Absolutely insane.
For a fraction of that you can get 1gbps from Comcast and you'll never utilize most of it in 99% of consumer situations.
I'm in a small quasi rural 'city' in the US, hours away from any consequential city, and I can get 1.2gbps from Comcast for 15-20% of the income adjusted rate in question referenced for Thailand.
It seems common to forget how astoundingly high US median income, disposable income, and GDP per capita figures are compared to the rest of the world. The latest 2022 estimates are pegging US GDP per capita at nearly double that of France and Japan. To match up on median disposable income figures, you have to use hyper affluent countries like Australia, Denmark, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway as references. Then people come on HN and proclaim how they're paying only $20 per month for Internet access, in a country with 1/10-1/5 the median disposable income of the US. The US is more expensive than it should be for Internet access (better telecom competition would go a long ways toward fixing that), however the reality is US income figures are also a lot higher than most of the developed world.
Where your number comes into play is for people pricing Netflix subscriptions.
You end up with absurd examples where Botswana is comparable to China; Russia is comparable to Greece; Puerto Rico is comparable to Spain, ahead of Portugal, and just a bit lower than Japan; Kazakhstan is just a bit behind Latvia and Slovakia; Taiwan is far ahead of Finland, France, UK, New Zealand.
Imputed rent for example is one of those things that’s kind of silly on the face of it but makes various comparisons more reasonable. On the other hand it can also imply a great deal of economic activity that isn’t actually happening.
PPP is the same sort of calculation. If rents crash because a great deal of housing was built it can make GDP comparisons kind of meaningless. The country has more tangible wealth, people are better off, yet GDP falls. That’s not what you want the number to represent.
That means you can have two countries with comparable GDP per-capita, where one of them have a more affluent population and able to pay higher prices.
I went with 5G from T-Mobile for $50 a month.
I live in rural BC and I'm was able to get 80Mb for $35 using a no-name internet only provider with no contract.
If I went with one of the big cable companies I would be paying at least double for the same thing
So my internet is provided by Lightspeed on Shaw cable.
As much as Canadian telecom seems to own the CRTC it isn’t nearly as consumer unfriendly as when I lived in the US.
I had an apartment in downtown Seattle which had 2 choices for internet. Many of my friends were quite impressed since most addresses are only served by one ISP.
This price randomness never occured to me in germany, and just booking a fixed low price on a website was so much more convenient.
Moved to Thailand (BKK) in 2016 and was so disappointed by a very new condominium in the center, which didn't even allowed for FTTH lines.
Real Estate Developers usually make contracts within their Condos, to force the whole building to use only one provider.
Mobile plans are also on the cheap side, to the point of being competitive with many third world countries (for example, I wasn't that impressed with prices in Thailand in 2020 for comparable plans, only a 1-2€ difference with what I had at home).
This is getting to the point that I find myself often suggesting fellows from border countries open a line in France, just so that they can enjoy the "European roaming data envelope" that comes with most plans (i.e. several gigabytes are free to use from anywhere in Europe, and you can make calls and texts to other EU countries when abroad...) after realizing how expensive and suckish mobile plans are in their country (Belgium in this instance).
[0] https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/French-news/Best-and...
Which provider would you recommend? I remember taking a look a while back and the most viable option was Free, but 15.99 EUR a month for when I need roaming 3–4 times a year seemed a bit excessive at 180.- per year.
SIM card is free, you can top it up with a prepaid amount or do a one-month plan without renewing it, and I just checked their T&Cs relating to roaming and they are actually quite generous[1][2].
Besides, their website is (for the most part) translated in English due to their target demographic, so no need for full French fluency here!
Some good info in English on the French telco landscape can be found at [3].
[0] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/
[1] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/international-call-rates
[2] https://mobile.lebara.com/fr/en/terms-and-conditions#section...: See section 2.4.2 (in French unfortunately)
[3] https://en.selectra.info/broadband-phone-france/guides/mobil...
Edit: missing word
A cursory search indicates that both Orange and Bouygues (as well as their contract-free offshoots, Sosh and B&YOU respectively) still offer this as a paid option at 5€ and 7€ per month respectively.
This means you could get the plan appropriate for your needs, then suspend it (for at most 6 month per year it seems) and only reactivate it when you need it.
However since this procedure requires getting in touch with customer service, it should be reserved for people well versed in French :-)
Edit: adding links (all in French)
https://www.echosdunet.net/dossiers/suspendre-ligne#suspensi...
https://assistance.sosh.fr/faq/308268
https://www.assistance.bouyguestelecom.fr/s/article/suspensi...
If you know someone in France, you may ask them to make a "solemn declaration" that you live at their address; then you only need provide their own proof of residency (people living with their parents routinely do so).
Tourist and prepaid SIM cards are still exempted and, depending on your case, can prove quite interesting.
For example, we offer $40 service, and if you're in our historical areas that's 1Gbit symmetrical, and if you're in newer areas we've turned up in the last year that's 10Gbit symmetrical.
We're expanding (as I expect most ISPs that can undercut the major players that much are), but it requires actually stringing fiber through neighborhoods on poles, so it takes a while (but that can be scaled...).
If you don't have telephone poles, it's much harder/more expensive to build out an area, so often those are skipped (at least initially) as areas cheaper to deliver to are prioritized. The is unfortunately a lot of new development, as they'll build neighborhood with underground utilities and pre-wire AT&T and Comcast, making it hard for others to deliver to the area without a lot of cost and work (trenching).
Some people a few miles away have a fiber POP at the end of their shared driveway, and are trying to decide if they should pay the extra couple hundred per house to go from 1GBit to 25GBit symmetric to the houses.
At the ISP I work for, I believe we spec out the cabling we need to a neighborhood and then order a special bundle with breakouts at specific locations along the length to serve locations, and then string that along the poles. I'm not sure why we wouldn't serve a house with one of those, but those go back to a central point in a neighborhood, and it's possible the backhaul from the central office to that central point in the neighborhood passes houses that aren't served. Where to build is all about ease of wiring an area and housi g density. It's all about cost per houses passed. The good news is that maybe your area is slated to get fiber since it goes by there, and it's just a matter of the lower hanging fruit being picked first.
This street got sold off to a bankrupt telco (from what I can tell, their business model is to buy up unprofitable lines, then periodically file for bankruptcy).
There are a few local fiber providers. Maybe I could call and see what it would take to convince them to build out. (There is definitely demand here.)
Alternatively AT&T (who is not our local telco) keeps spamming us to get a business fiber to the home connection. They make it clear they'll ban customers that appear to be using it for residential traffic, but I think that sort of traffic discrimination falls afoul of California's network neutrality laws. Has anyone tried calling their bluff on that?
Be careful approaching incumbent major ISPs or letting them know if you got the signatures though. You might find they went out and offered sweetheart deals to the same people on two year contracts, but at existing service levels...
Regarding business fiber, I think they're more trying to keep people from reselling it as a micro ISP. If you're willing to pay business costs for personal use, I don't think they'll care. If you split the cost between 10 neighbors, they might. There may be other concerns they are dealing with that I'm not thinking of though.
For example I have 3 Internet connections at home that I pay ~ $30 in total, from 150 Mbps to 1 Gbps. I think the 1 Gbps is ~ $12/month, it is so cheap because there are so many options and I can afford to keep all 3 for redundancy (1 is a 4G mobile data capped at 200GB/month, it works even when there is a power failure in the entire neighborhood).
But if there is no variety of options and no competition, then price is high. From what I read, most ISP in USA are squeezing as much as they can from their clients, sometimes to ridiculous levels.
But it doesn’t matter because it isn’t actually offered in my area / the local telco can’t even notify the right people…
Also amusingly, both Comcast and Verizon have the very old (as in multiple decades) name for the street I live on as my address. It's only somewhat wrong (the name used to have a North on it)--but it is still wrong.
Until recently I paid $35 per month for a 300 Mbps line because I couldn’t justify the jump to 1 Gbps.
Then I had to upload some local Hyper-V servers to AWS to convert them to AMIs and figured what the heck I’d upgrade the line.
I would have no interest in upgrading beyond 1 Gbps right now though. There are too many infrastructure components that need to be upgraded to attain that and I don’t have a use case for it.
It's orders of magnitude more uncommon than doing so in the USA.
So bring all the hate :)
Here in Australia: $90/month nets you “100/40mb”, which is really more like “~85mb down, 25 up but only a quiet night, if you’re next to the router, and it hasn’t rained within the last week”.
If you live in an area that can get HFC, FTTP, FTTN etc. it’s possible these days to get a pretty consistent 1000/50 for $150/month. Those fibre services are pretty stable in my experience, definitely a million times better than the old broadband which as you put got destroyed by bad weather and distance from the exchange.
Apparently you can pay money to have fibre routed to your house from the nearest node/etc, but I rent, so I’m not going to do that.
Where I’m at it’s $80/month for a 5gb/s. If you want that in a major city, >1m people; good luck.
Corruption, regulation and development costs are just too high.
Rather sad to be honest.