I'm in a rural city in Thailand, fiber 2Gbps is $50 / mo. And this is just for normie. Like unimpressive.
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.
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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.
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.