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Comment by joenot443 | Hacker News Reader

I pay $40/mo for 500mbps in my Bushwick apartment - is that considered expensive?

By US standards? No, probably not.

But, a quick search indicates you can get similar broadband in Glasgow, Scotland for ~15 GBP/month. And Rome, Italy looks like ~25EUR/month.

I’m in Stockholm, and our condo HOA (BRF) includes 1Gbps per unit in the fee for all units because billing individually would cost more in admin than the service itself. We have FTTP and then cat6 to each unit.

That sounds really convenient! Is it a new building? I know the odd American or Canadian build will have that, but only the newer and more expensive ones.

The building is from the 1940s.

But this is a pretty common setup for condos in Swedish cities. Rentals usually have access to the same infrastructure but at higher prices due to kickbacks demanded by the landlords from the ISPs.

The backbone of it all is a state owned fiber connecting the cities together with municipal fiber.

But even outside of the cities FTTP is quite common. There are companies which specialize in finding rural areas where there’s enough interest to justify the cost of connecting them and then coordinating getting an economic association setup to own and manage the local infrastructure.

I had that in Sweden 20 years ago. Typically our local municipality put fiber whenever they dug up anything, so fiber is everywhere.

This is something to underscore, US people always talks about how "big and sprawling" the US is, but there's fiber at my fathers house in Northern Sweden that's in an area with similar population density to Wisconsin or whatever rural US state you want to pick.

Some kind of city(iirc) managed fiber and he can switch commercial operators (And speeds/prices) by contacting them to get new terms, that's an actually free market.

In Copenhagen mine is billed individually, and is 75kr for 1Gb/s. About $10.

Otherwise the same system.

Just did my internet contract for my apartment in rural Italy (a town of around 2k people in the Verona province). 1Gb symmetric is indeed 25EUR/month. I added a few stuff on top like static IPv4 and reached 32EUR/month.

I’m paying 100 bucks for 2.5gb fiber in socal. I don’t consider that expensive either. I’ve seen internet prices internationally and they kinda suck outside of some areas that have decent providers - but that goes for the US too.

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