Ask HN: What's your residential Internet speed and cost? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's your residential Internet speed and cost?

23 pointsshanebellone88 comments

Long story short, I had fiber installed yesterday and it's impressive for $60/m.

Download - 946 MBPS Upload - 944 MBPS

(tested with speedtest.net)

Verizon fios, 100mbos, $65. Major (for us) metropolis, East coast USA. They turned on IPv6 like 2 maybe 3years ago, yay.

I'd love a gratis bump to 200mbps some day.

Edit: oh snap! It was pretty hard to find plans on the website (most pages wanted me to check availability with address/email/phone... No) but I did eventually find a page that told me there's a 300mbps for $55 - $10 if I use a de it card. Called them, and done! This post saved me money & tripled my speed.

I have a very expensive grandfathered Verizon unlimited wireless plan with no softcap (but they'll drop me if I use 100GB or so repeatedly). Alas it's not qualified, otherwise I'd save another $20!

"This post saved me money & tripled my speed."

Great win!

Verizon I'm sorry but the website experience trying to do this was awful. I called & we changed my plan in like 5 minutes, done.

The person on the phone told me I could save money by switching to debit/bank-number autopay. I said, yeah, let me just go on the website & i'll do that after we chat, thanks.

Well, that took a while. Of course the vzw & fios accounts are basically separate, great, right. Eventually I got on, and then things really got bad. It showed the new plan, but instead of being charged $64.99 I was now being charged $66.66/mo, not $59.99 (-$10 for the autopay i was going to try to set up). I couldn't get the website to let me change my billing. Eventually I called & hand gave my debit card number to the agent. Then asked them to confirm what price I was going to pay, which they confirmed as $49.99. They sent me a confirmation email... and it was almost right: $59.99, the confirmation email not showing the $10 debit-autopay discount. Fine, it'll work out, whatever. Still the only thing I can find on the website to tell me what my charge will be is "Change plans" which still shows I'm paying $66.66/mo for my 300mbps plan though.

The agent also mentioned a discount for having a VZW plan. I demured that I think my grandfathered unlimited plan probably doesn't qualify, but said I was interested. They sent me an email with a link an offer. The first time I clicked it I got a huge yellow page with a tiny 320x240 sized "Server has encountered an error processing your response" in the upper left. I tried in incognito & went through some sign in flows & eventually to a spinner where it seemed like it might go,... then it threw a huge 'Exception has been encountered error, try again' in the middle of the page.

There's been a bunch of other small tatters along the way. A bunch of the flows took multiple times to go. The "Change Plans" page just didn't load a couple of times. If you use the app, like 1/3rd of the buttons on the app just open a page where you have to sign in again. There's clearly like 50 different systems held together with duck tape & shoestring, & my heavens, what a clusterfuck this pretty simple exercise was. I still can't get reliable up to date information on what to expect from the website, but the agents all say it's good & the email they sent me was only partially wrong (no autopay) but they say it'll work. My heavens Verizon, please.

I'm not sure how they would have contacted me (sms would have worked well), but also, how long ago was the new plan introduced? A courtesy notice I could get a better upgrade would have been nice.

End of the day though, this post was still a win. But I did want to share some of the travails that surrounded this.

My guess is you'll be very lucky to get the $49.99 rate, considering all the times they have sent you the wrong rate. I went through this nightmare with Time-Warner before the Charter/Spectrum buyout: they raised my rate from $55/mo to $65/mo, I called, they said they had fixed it and credited my account. The next month they did credit $10, but still charged $65. I called again, same story, next bill, same story. On the 3rd call I told them they can change my rate to $45/mo or I'm switching to $15/mo ELP. They said they couldn't give me $45/mo, so I did switch to ELP. And I'm still on it with Spectrum. The funny thing is, right after I did that, TW started sending me all kinds of offers for less than $45/mo! These cable companies are so screwed up and frustrating.

My neighbor recently went on a trip to Ireland and added international texting and calling to her Verizon phone plan for 10 days for $100. But the continued to bill her $100 extra every month for several months. Every time she called, they said they had taken care of it, but it was still screwed up the next month.

Hong Kong, similar speeds to yours up and down (9xx Mbps), but 2 lines (2x1000 Mbps). $45 USD per month. Speed to servers in NYC is ~ 100 Mbps.

     Server: HKIX - Hong Kong (id = 34555)
        ISP: Netvigator
    Latency:     2.90 ms   (0.35 ms jitter)
   Download:   949.79 Mbps (data used: 676.7 MB)
     Upload:   946.68 Mbps (data used: 460.6 MB)

Packet Loss: 0.0%

Budapest, Hungary: 1Gb/s up, 2Gb/s down => ~$14/mo

Los Angeles: 300Mb/s up/down => $60/mo

The disparity in service and cost is surprising.

Switzerland, Init7

10/10 Gbps for 66CHF (~$70) / month.

Unfortunately my router can't firewall packets at 10Gbps so I get around 1Gbps effectively. :)

Same.

A friend told me to have a PC router to increase speed.

I have a Ubiquiti Security Gateway that seems to manage by LAN network well. However, adding an Edge Router X significantly reduces my speed.

$30/mo for 20Mbps down/1.2Mbps up

Spectrum (aka Charter) near Louisville, KY

Grandfathered Time-Warner ELP (Everyday Low Price) that was originally $15/mo for 3Mbps down/1.2Mbps up

I could get 300Mbps up/down from AT&T for $65/mo, but that is only a 1-year intro rate and puts me on the "call AT&T every year to protest price hikes" treadmill. That's the reason I switched from 50/10 service years ago with Time Warner to ELP.

France: 72 EUR / month ($80) for 2 Gbit/s down // 600 Mbit/s up (router doesn't have any SFP port though and ethernet ports aren't 2.5 Gbit/s, so it's advertized as 1 Gbit/s down per machine max)

Luxemburg: 42 EUR / month ($46) for 500 MBit/s down // 250 Mbit/s up

Fiber to the home is becoming a reality in many countries... House in France is in a very remote area and yet there's fiber even there, since a few months.

Building in Luxemburg has an impressive (and beautiful) fiber optic rack in a dedicated room, next to the garages, from which all the apartments are dispatched (new building, wired with fiber for everybody from day one).

Which provider do you use in France?

I have Free, 40€/month for 2.5 Gbps (and an SPF in the box (a Delta)). I do not have 1+ Gbps equipement so I have 1000/600 Mbps (measured).

The contract also includes TV, Netflix, Amazon Prime and Canal+ Series for a year. And a landline.

After a year the price will be I Think 50€, but I will change the provider of I do not get a good deal.

The cheaper dilution is about 20€/month for 200 Mbps IIRC.

5Gbs symmetrical AT&T Fiber residential for $170/month in metro area of southeast US.

And backup than I never have to use except middle of night maybe once a quarter when AT&T doing maintenance or something… first year we had like 5 fiber cuts and autofailover was awesome, but they finally buried deeper and no more cuts.

1.2Gbs Down/35Mbs Up Comcast Cable for $120, can’t remember Internet part of the bill, $90 or $100 I think; no TV channels, but do have Telephone service for alarm system (AT&T compresses VoIP and it doesn’t work).

Xfinity is the only choice I have. It advertises as 5Gpbs and costs 100 USD

My real speed:

Download 14Mbps -- Upload 1 Mbps

If I had a choice of any other service, I would jump.

Note, Xfinity is really Comcast. I used Xfinity so this would show up in searches.

AT&T Fiber in Round Rock, TX (Austin metro area) 940 down; 939 up - per Speednet's macOS app via Ethernet directly to AT&T's supplied router.

Unfortunately, I'm paying $80.42/mo. as I'm well past all the offers they're willing to give. Still - overall pretty reliable, except when we have a power outage (not AT&T's fault) and it takes (on average) 15-20 minutes to get back online.

UK, would get ~15 down and <1 up wired. Have a 4/5g connection that varies from 4 down to 350 down, generally stuck at about 6 up I think - only 4g for uploads. About £30/mo.

Strongly affected by signal strength, so I sometimes open the window to "let more internet in" which can dramatically improve speeds.

Very eagerly awaiting a proper fibre connection which would be symmetric gigabit for something like £40/mo.

Charter/Spectrum (upstate NY), 500Mbps down tier, $100/mo. In practice, tends to be between 80 and 100 MBps down; considering downgrading.

40 EUR/mo for 250 Mbps down, 50 Mbps up. Actual down is often about 280.

Germany, Deutsche Telekom DSL in a semi-urban neighborhood with no cable service.

Damn, that's terrible by most EU standards, very similar to here in Austria.

520/520 fiber $170/mo counting the static IP. Price likely due to no competition. Only alternatives are a highly congested LTE network or Starlink. very rural area I also had to pay to trench in the fiber as I was late to the party. Early subscribers trenching was paid for by the federal government.

Are symmetrical connections common? I hadn't seen that offered until they knocked on my door lol.

Was trenching expensive? Here they used the city's utility poles. They covered the neighborhood in a couple hours.

Should be common with fiber (not PON) and copper Ethernet. Other technologies like cable, some DSL and PON (typically advertised as ftth) are designed to be asymmetrical, they use a single wire or pair to send data and the spectrum is divided so download gets more.

You only typically see a symmetrical connection with fiber. Traditional cable connections have to sacrifice download speed for upload speed at a neighborhood level, so they usually do a roughly 90/10 ratio.

The trenching was expensive but I have a long driveway and trenched in two conduits for two fibers. The fiber is always underground here as winter is 7 to 9 months of the year and its easier than getting permission from the power company to share their poles as I am in a rural area. This is commonly reversed in cities as digging is often impossible due to overlapping electrical and sewage boundaries and other bureaucratic reasons.

Much of the power here is also underground to avoid outages from freezing lines and people hitting power poles. I'm glad I had my power traced out because the 7200 volt line goes right down the middle of my field where I might have trenched in water lines.

3Gbps each way fibre, with 1Gbps/50Mbps backup cable. GBP115/month from two separate providers. South London

What do you all do with such high speeds? Guessing video streaming. I don't need that as I prefer reading fantasy books instead.

I'm in India, pay slightly above $3/month to get 2GB/day (my average usage is about 400MB/day). Max speed I've seen while updating s/w from the terminal was around 2MBPS.

I am a web developer and researcher. I use my internet in excess of its cost. It's totally unnecessary for the typical browsing and streaming scenario.

High speed is convenient for the occasional install (apt get/npm install/nix develop). Other than that I could probably live with 20Mbits/s for web/ssh/youtube/spotify.

In Australia: I'm now in the ISP hopping game, to get the best value for money (you switch ISP's every 6 months or so to get deals)

right now I pay AU$85 a month for 100/40 plus static IP on HFC (Hybrid Fiber Co-ax) I just did a speed test (lunch time on a sunday) DOWNLOAD Mbps 104.65 UPLOAD Mbps 36.54

Shaped FTTH, 250/50 EUR30.

Hamburg, Germany, excellent peering and latency.

500/100 for EUR40 and 1000/250 for EUR50 would also be possible.

But I'm cheap, and the 100/40 I had from the same ISP was enough already. They just did an upgrade I couldn't avoid, price didn't change, so be it :-)

1 Gbps fiber optic with unlimited traffic in 2 places, one in the capital city and one in a small village in the mountains. Another one over GPRS, ~150 Mbps down and ~ 25 Mbps up with 200 GB/month of traffic. About $10/month each. Country = Romania.

Indiana, Chicago suburb

Comcast/Xfinity - $120/month!!!

175/11 Mbps down/up

The killer is the data cap, after 1299 Gb, it gets really expensive, really fast.

I can never download a language training set without going broke.

Or, I have to go to a friend who has ATT gigabit fiber with no limits for only $40/month.

Bellevue "rural" near Microsoft. 1Gbps symmetric from Ziply for about $90/month. With an option of up to 10Gbps for $300/m (that one's new).

I am staying on 1Gbps, but will likely upgrade within a year.

Right now I'd prefer to pay extra for IPv6 though.

I pay $70 for 1 Gb/s but I usually end up getting 800-900 mbps up/down when I run a Speedtest which is fine by me. I switched to centurylink fiber during the pandemic. Before that I was paying comcast $65 for 100 down / 10 up.

Seattle WA

Symmetric gigabit on AT&T fiber (USA) on their older GPON-based network for $85USD/month. The GPON OLT for my neighborhood isn't oversubscribed (yet), so I consistently get the advertised speeds.

520 down, 24 up. Comcast cable near Detroit. About $100/mo. They email me occasionally to say I can get better download speeds if I upgrade my modem, but I haven't bothered yet.

1500 mbps download/1000 mbps upload at 85$/month (USD), I'm in Canada, Vancouver.

There was an option for 2500/2500 mbps, but I can't find an excuse to buy that plan for now.

Australia: 50/20 Mbps @ 79AUD (~53 USD) per month.

My speeds are actually lower than in 2019, when I was on 100/40 for the same price - but that was with a 500 GB per month data cap.

Also Australia.

Getting 790/50 Mbps for ~USD$100 (paying for 1000/50).

Our 'NBN' is luck of the draw with which type of connection your street has, and then dependent on what state your 30+ year old underground copper is in.

I pay 85/mo for 1.5m dpwn amd maybe 300k up. Dsl, less than an hour from a majlr american city. Broadband beyond suburbs is still a dream. I miss online gaming.

I pay for gigabit internet, but this is my results on Speedtest with Wi-Fi.

545mb/s down, 41.6 mb/s up. Xfinity 2 year promo $79.99.

I don’t recall what it goes up to after the promo.

London England, 100 MBps down, 10 up.

18 GBP / month.

Does the trick for me, I don't really send / receive large files except for the occasional ml model from huggingface.

Contract: 1GBps down, 200 Mbps up. Actual: 850-900 Mbps down, 180-200 Mbps up Price: €50/mth Provider: Vodafone Location: Ireland, rural area.

Advertised: 10gbit fiber symmetric - $30. Real: ~5gbit upload, 2gbit download (max); ~800mbit up & down (median) Sonic, San Francisco Bay Area

How does that happen? Fiber shouldn't have congestion, right?

I attribute it to the speed test I server which is picked up - it is not the ISP provided one, so I assume there will be some variation of the measured bandwidth. Manual tests against the ISP provided instance is much closer to 10gbit, but I haven't bothered to automate it yet to graph it.

On other hand, my understanding is that fiber is not immune from congestion problems - the only difference is at what point it happens.

0.5 gigabit (down and up) fiber for $45/mo in Michigan rural village. I could get full gigabit for $60, but it's not worth it to me.

10gbps $40/mth usually get about 3.5 down.

10 GBPS for $40/m? Where in the world do you live?

South Korea

Can get it for as low as $48 in Sweden.

In India, Mumbai, Jio Fiber

Speed - 300 MBPS 1500Rs(18.3$)/Month

Along with NetFlix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ HotStar and other subscriptions.

Amsterdam, Ziggo cable 300 Mbps down 30 mbps up for 26 Eur/mo for 12 months, then 53 Eur/mo

Is that on a business contract or private / consumer one?

980 down/880 up $99/month. Based out of Massachusetts, it's a good deal for this area

I have fiber in my apartment and I’m getting 900/700 on average.

Amsterdam, Netherlands for 35 euros per month.

1gbps (symmetric), 110 (or so, it’s gone up and I haven’t committed the new fee to memory)

45 mbps/down, 28 mbps/up fiber. 105 USD/month. Port-au-Prince, Haiti

95 Mbps down, 20 up, $35 USD, SF Bay Area, Monkeybrains, rooftop wireless antenna.

Germany, 250MBPS Download, 50MBPS upload, costs around 40€ or 44$ per month.

Italy, very small town. DSL, 200mbps down/20mbps up, 35 EUR/month.

481.43 Mbps / 23.64 Mbps @ $99.99/mo

Spectrum

I came from Xfinity which was ~900mbps download and ~40mbps upload but ~$115/m.

Fiber is better and cheaper here. Something to look out for in your area too.

150/10 @ $65/mo with Spectrum. 1GB fiber is only a few miles away and I'll jump on that at $60/mo.

Richmond, VA (USA) - Verizon FIOS, 300/300Mbps - $29.99/month

Starlink, $110 per month

100mb/s down and 20mb/s upload

Colorado mountains, 10,000 feet altitude.

India - Airtel -

300 Mbps (symmetric) - INR 999 ~ US $12 / month (unlimited data)

I have two fiber links at approx. 300/300mbps for $45/$40.

India - BSNL

Down - 70 Mbps, Up - 51 Mbps and Data - 3.3TB for $8/month.

8gbps / 8gbps $140 CAD ($100 USD) - Toronto, Canada

Just tested:

2040 down, 102 up (I pay €65/mo for 2gbit down, 100 up)

Cable, 100mbit down, 5mbit up, 50 EUR/month

Around the same speek but I pay 30 GBP per month

San Francisco, out in the sticks by the ocean.

Download 936 Mbps

Upload 24 Mbps

US$90/month

Gigabit at 45 GBP per month (city fibre)

After reading that my brain spent 10 seconds on two things:

1. I wonder why they have data limits on gigabit internet.

2. How much data is 45 GBP anyway?

I'm an idiot.

GBP is the currency - it’s the abbreviation of British pound sterling

No it's not.

what is it then?

GBP is the iso code, stg is the abbreviation for pound sterling

Israel 200up 200 dowm 120NIS (40 euro)

10/10gbps 59CHF (66$)

Internet + TV

500/500 rj45 $12/month, building likely has 10G fiber.

1 gbps download, 20 upload (I know lol) 15$

20 what upload? Gbps?!?

Mbps :(

2.83 dollars or 800 pakistani rupees,(Lahore,Pakistan)

All of us 5 family members can stream 1080p youtube at a time,

Upload speed is 1 mb something, depends on time of the day.

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