Hacker News Reader

Comment by austenallred | Hacker News Reader

I think one of the things I'm most excited for is canceling my absurd Comcast agreement.

Yep. I pay 60 bucks a month for 40 Mbps, and Google offers 1 Gbps for 70 bucks a month. I pay almost the same price for 4% the speed (not to mention horrible customer service).

You're well off. Here in Ontario, I pay ~$75 a month (after taxes & extra fees) for 25mbit. I would kill for $60 40mbit service.

Seriously! These people don't know how bad it can be.

Don't forget the data caps.

Have you looked at Teksavvy? They sell a cable package in Ontario that gives you 60 mbits for a bit over 60$ (more after tax and all that)... You can get pretty decent download caps with them (it starts at 75 gigs/month, but I have upgraded to 300 gigs/month for a bit more. they also have an unlimited option).

I was with TekSavvy before I moved (2x25mbit mlppp). Everything was great, and there was even a promo for "no activation fees" when I signed up.

When I moved a year later, they told me I would have to pay that activation fee again, because Bell treats move orders like setting up a new customer, and thus they can't waive the fee. I ended up going with another ISP that had a similar promo.

Different areas have different packages, or at least differing availability. The best package available in my area is 28mbps and unlimited bandwidth for $62/month.

Why does Canada have such terrible internet? Is it a regulation thing, competition thing, or what? Why do you guys have such extreme data caps?

As an American in Canada, I most often hear that a duopolistic system is the root of the country's internet problems. I haven't heard a single suggestion that there are technical limitations or lack of consumer demand.

Many reasons. 1. We're a unpopulous country for the area we occupy. 2. Our investment environment is much more conservative. 3. We gave some sweet deals to telephone companies in order to get 80 percent telephone coverage back in the 70s. Toronto isn't bad though. You can get 250 mbit for a decent price

AFAIK Internet is unregulated here. The CRTC is [basically] run by Bell & Rogers, they seem to do what they want. When one has a deal, the other shortly follows - when you cancel with one you're stuck going to the other.

As long as they each gain the customers the other loses, they win.

Oligopoly (or duopoly in most cases) with regulatory capture.

Same here on the Central Coast of California. In my town though there is only one cable internet provider (Comcast).

My only other option is DSL

Comcast is still sadly better than Charter (though I think Charter is owned by Comcast now?).

You've got it good. Here in Santa Cruz California at the southern end of Silicon Valley, I pay $70/month for a whopping 6mbit (ADSL). This is via a reseller of everyone's darling Sonic. They helpfully include "free" phone service I have no use for, which is then responsible for a not free $10 of that bill, $7 of which goes to Sonic for providing the "free" phone service.

Who is the reseller?

I bet he's talking about Cruzio's Velocity service.

(I'm on it too)

As bronson said, it is indeed Cruzio. There was 26 hour outage yesterday due to a fibre cut in SV. It didn't affect people on Cruzio's DSL service but did affect those of us on the resold Sonic Fusion service.

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/capitola/ci_23040335/at-t-c...

And yet it gets worse: here in South Africa, I'm paying just over 140 USD for a 8mbit ADSL, with a +- 50 GB bandwidth cap.

I suspect the New Zealanders are about to chirp in with their extortion-level rates :)

and I pay around 80 in TN for 25 mbps

I pay $40 for 3 mbps. Palm Springs, CA, Time Warner. Fios is not here yet. Only cable.

Wow, I spent some time in Palm Desert, CA and I was able to get 20Mbs for about $40 for the summer. Month to month no commitments. (with Time Warner)

Seriously? I'm paying $70/month (no modem rental fee as I own my own) for this http://www.speedtest.net/result/2652775120.png in the Nashville area.

What part do you live in? I think they're upgrading everyone? Or maybe it was just the middle Tennessee area. Either way, the $70 I'm paying is 10 times slower than the internet Google Fiber users get for the same price so even $70 is still grossly overprices for what I'm getting.

wow...im in Mid TN, the Smyrna/Murf area. I am not in the Metro area at all.

I also use my own modem. My speeds are nowhere near your results, it is actually closer to 15-20mbps down and 2-4mbps up.

I need some more info from you on this, I'd love to find out where they have this speed out here...

I only pay for internet and regularly go over my 300GB/month data cap as well

I live in Cool Springs. I had the 50Mbps service which they recently doubled to 100Mbps (with the same 300GB cap unfortunately). They had been playing advertisements on the radio about doubling speeds and someone in my area mentioned they power cycled their modem and got the new speeds, which worked for me.

I don't have TV or Phone service from them, only Internet. I'm not sure if it's a promo or not, but that's what I've been paying since January 01 when I cut my TV service.

does google have customer service for the internet service?

You're lucky. I have to pay comcast $70/month for 12mbps

I just called comcast and got them to drop me to $50 and upgrade me to 50mbps. I was really going to quit until they did that

I don't need 1gbps and would love something like 25mbits for, say, $20. They really need a midtier connection between free 5m and 1G.

Hell, I would pay $40 for 5mbit if they beat down the latency. Remote-desktop type applications would be much more pleasant.

I pay $75 a month for 500gb of data and a 20mb cable connection here in Australia... The Government is rolling out a whopping 100mbps network which is due for completion in 2025... One can only dream that Google would try and implement something like Google Fiber in Australia but the limited capacity of undersea cables probably means it won't happen for another 100 years.

About a month ago Comcast doubled the speed of my connection for free (50/10 -> 105/20). I was delighted as I assumed it meant that a competitor was rolling out fiber in the area or something, and I was very disappointed when an hour scouring the internet for announcements revealed nothing. Somehow I don't think that was the intended reaction.

Then again, Comcast tries to get me to "upgrade" to packages costing half as much as my current one on a regular basis, so who knows what they were going for.

Wait for the other shoe to drop.

The pattern is raise the speed, then wait 60-90 days and raise all the prices.

I totally agree. Comcast is not the worst. My parents happen to live in an area serviced by a ma and pop cable company (Service Electric Cablevision). 20/2 internet with a 200GB cap for $51 a month. Comcast, which is available to the community less than five miles away, crushes this. This is only 45 minutes from Philadelphia!

What's just sad is you can hit 200GB a month with a 80kb/s connection.

I can't wait to cancel my TWC internet. I'm paying $58/mth for a 20mbps plan but the max speed I can get is ~11-12 mbps. Can't wait for google fiber to come so I can dump TWC.

Me, ATT... <10Mbps is a joke....

My 2mbps internet connection and I envy all of you.

My last apartment had <1mbps with AT&T. I was working remotely for a company that required VPN+VNC into a linux server on their intranet to get anything done. Any time my roommates tried to watch something on hulu/netflix (frequently), our router had to be rebooted.

Your router was shit, then, and probably bad enough that you weren't able to measure the true connection speed. Did you let the ISP provide the router? That's always a mistake.

It was an exceptionally shitty router, yeah. One of my roommates wanted to be in charge of the internet connection; she went with the lowest end AT&T plan, and she had the router that they had given her in her last apartment. On top of that, the cable going into the router was practically falling apart; I didn't actually know any of this until shortly before I moved out, at which point there wasn't a lot of motivation to do anything about it.

Upon moving out, I got a 18 Mbps cable subscription & a Motorola Surfboard Extreme. Now the only shitty piece of networking equipment in my setup is a Belkin wifi router that I haven't been bothered to upgrade.

I'm not sure that speed would be enough to want me to go with Google, but I'm paranoid that way. I'd welcome the competition and the presumed price drop at Comcast. It's fast enough for me.

For the prices they're charging, just get a VPN, still be cheaper than cable in most places...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com