EDIT: I am in the US, and I've just realized this is a UK-oriented article. Nevertheless, the point might still stand.
I can only infer what happened but they really didn't want me to be without a regular phone line so I determined that was their legal weakness. The only way companies that large move like that is if something threatens their status with the local government. A call from a resident saying the company wouldn't install a phone line is a big no-no in my understanding.
If you ask for phone service, Comcast will sell you a "landline" that just consists of a combo box cable modem and VoIP ATA. You can buy it with internet access or without, and they still give you the same equipment. The ATA part gives you an analog phone line to connect to your house phone wiring, but everything outside the house runs over existing coax infrastructure.
Maybe I'm not asking the right questions? It seems exceedingly difficult to get services over actual copper.
Yeah, that's kind of the issue. That, and latency.
Sure. The "for what it is" is doing a lot of heavy lifting, though. See also: it's rather expensive for what it is.
I'd love symmetric fiber for $50, but 'for what it is' isn't doing much lifting at all.
This is also true about nearly every other country that exists or has existed throughout history. US is notable for being, on average, much more competitive and less corrupt.
(But it's heading in the wrong direction, and that's only on average. Many countries have caught up, and a few others have surpassed it.
Corruption of markets happens because of no regulation or because of too much regulation. I personally think where to draw this line is an art and very difficult in an extremely polarised country like the US.
It's still pretty good on the corruption index, although getting worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index.
Why would you want DSL? In my area, Verizon's DSL is 3.1Mbps which really isn't good for much and costs $75/mo ($40 for the DSL and $35 for the required home phone service with it). You also have to pay $3.50/mo for the router or buy it for $100.
Verizon stopped expanding Fiber for the most part which is a shame. AT&T is doubling its fiber deployment in their markets.
Do you have a cable provider that's your broadband provider? Verizon is generally only offering 5G Home Internet in areas where there are other broadband options so it seems curious that you'd be interested in DSL over a cable connection offering 100x the speed.
I mean, this contributes to my point: it's only "cheap" if you buy into their plan and also upgrade your phone. For a variety of reasons, this isn't a good fit for me, and I'm beginning to suspect there might be a small-but-respectable market of others who resemble me.
It's $50/mo (IIRC) if you have mobile phone service with them. For me, the worst part was that they want you to mount their 5G device on your window, and I'm in the city and have only a few windows. It's not an ugly device really, but I don't want to glue a big device to my living room window.
A single HD video stream (1080p) can require 8 mbps. Trying to consume multiple of these, especially with a realtime protocol like WebRTC, is impossible on an ADSL connection.
My current setup is ADSL. I am trying to replicate it elsewhere.
As a subject-matter expert on "things I like", let me assure you that I am indeed very happy with it.
1: so rough that I wrote a script that power cycled the modem every time it disconnected, since that was faster than waiting for it to recover. I haven't used that scheme for months now though since it was no longer necessary.