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Comment by geoka9 | Hacker News Reader

I'm in a top 10 most expensive city in the world (Canada) and the best I can get for $50 is 80 Mbps (and even that is only available as a promotion that you can't get by simply going to the ISP's website and buying a plan).

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I'm in Vancouver and paying about 55 CAD plus taxes for 300Mbps. So it's possible to get a bit more for similar money. The downside of that is however those are not available as regular offers, and you constantly have to deal with ISPs and rention programs to keep the price down. Even had various events where the ISP randomly increased the price inside one month, until I gave them a call and ask to fix it again.

This price randomness never occured to me in germany, and just booking a fixed low price on a website was so much more convenient.

I live in Germany. Enjoying 10 Mbit/s downstrean and 1 Mbit/s upstream. For 30 Euros per month. 80 would be like heaven for me.

Well, elsewhere in Germany you can get 2.5GBit/s fiber...

Berlin?

Not yet i think.

I'm in Vancouver, BC and paying 80$/mo for 1Gbps symmetric. I could get 2.5Gbps but it would be about twice the cost - and I would have to get something that can do 2.5G link speed on an SFP+, not many devices can.

I'm in the suburbs of the most expensive city in the world and I get 1gbps for $70 CAD

$50 gets me 2Mb ADSL here in the city centre of Glasgow. Your lucky.

I’m within 2km of Parliament and can’t get fibre. It’s disgusting.

In Winnipeg, Canada, I get 500Mbps up/down for 75$.

Have you looked at smaller ISPs?

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

I've looked at the smaller ISPs in my area and they're terrible as far as pricing goes. Both the "major" options are still using Rogers' last-mile infrastructure, they offer poorer customer service (because of the previous point), charge the same or more money for the same level of service and offer no real incentive to switch. Having talked to some techs at TekSavvy, none of the smaller ISPs can offer anything interesting like synchronous speeds over coax/DOCSIS because they have little/no control over how the last-mile infrastructure is run. For that same reason they can't offer anything faster than 1G down either. It all feels like smoke and mirrors, and the CRTC seems to have a vested interest in keeping internet prices sky-high.

Yeah the last mile stuff is still owned by the majors, but at least the choice exists.

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.

How is your internet provisioned? Is the no-name ISP building their own infrastructure or are they using the network of a larger one?

In Canada the infrastructure owners are required to give access to small providers at a regulated price.

So my internet is provided by Lightspeed on Shaw cable.

I use a local provider in NYC, and I used one in Seattle. I think both of them had some kind of point to point connection on the roof.

i signed up with one of the small ISPs in rural Canada. month after, they were bought by Rogers... :-(

Is this Toronto?

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