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Comment by PeterisP | Hacker News Reader

The prices seem insane - are they representative of the US broadband market?

I'm currently paying 15 EUR/mth for a 100mbit service, more bandwidth would be more expensive, but not extremely so.

The US chose to deal with telecoms differently than the EU, thinking it would incentivize investment and create copetition for better networks. What it's done is the opposite. Planet Money ran a great episode[1] about it. It's worth a listen!

[1]: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2014/04/04/299060527/episode-...

No, they're much cheaper. I pay $50/mo for 18Mbps. The more rural you are, the worse it gets. I know people paying $35/mo for 2Mbps.

I live in a "rural" place on one of the nation's fiber backbones, one of the top in the country due to nearby military/government facilities, and we don't even get the full 7Mbps bandwidth we pay for. And that's still $30-40/mo.

And all that is because Verizon won't upgrade their equipment to handle the congestion that happens at night. It's not that they can't, but that we're "rural".

I live on a farm in Texas. We pay $100/mo for 5mbps internet and rarely get one. (Our landline is bundled with it) Our whole internet has gone down for days multiple times.

I live in the least rural place in the country (midtown Manhattan), and that's about what I'm paying (technically it's $60 for 20 Mbps advertised[0]).

[0] Which usually gets me about 1 MB/s in practice.

I just moved from a rural property where I was paying $120/mos for 1.5mbps nominally (sometimes lower...rarely higher...).

I'm now paying $60/mos for 120Mbps down and 10Mbps up.

hmm I use a combo TMobile broadband at 45Mbps and library wifi at 2Mbps..USA is getting better at least fixed wireless is finally taking off

Prices can vary wildly depending where you live on the planet. For 13.5 EUR per month in most cities in Romania, you can get:

1000 mbps download speed to the Internet

30 mpbs upload speed to the Internet

100 mbps upload speed inside the provider's network

Uncapped traffic

20GB Cloud storage

Free Wi-Fi in public places where the ISP is present

IPv6, Dynamic DNS, Parental Control

> I'm currently paying 15 EUR/mth for a 100mbit service

Where do you live?

Here in Philly (and also in Boston, DC, and New York), RCN charges $50/month for 110 mbit service. This is apparently quite similar to similar service in Prague, London, and Dublin: http://arstechnica.com/business/2013/10/cheapest-150mbps-bro....

Hrm, not sure why they used Magnet as an example for Dublin, there; you can get the same service for cheaper from other providers, if you're willing to take out a contract (Magnet is month-to-month) and UPC's 120mbit service is also cheaper.

I would love to see sensible comparisons of available bandwidth for different countries. This would have to include some weird kludges of average pricing over cable, dial-up, satellite, and mobile. (And maybe wifi plans too).

The ISP industry doesn't feel like a free market.

Also, extremely regional. For instance, I currently get a 12mbit/sec service for 30 euro a month. In my old apartment, less than a mile away, I got 120mbit/sec for 40 euro a month (and could have gotten 200mbit/sec for 45). Assuming that the telecom gets a move on with its VDSL rollout, in a couple of months, I'll get 100mbit for 35 euro a month. And that's in a city; it gets a lot messier in many rural areas, where the only plausible non-wireless providers can be fixed microwave.

That said, there's no consumer service remotely as expensive as that AT&T one here.

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