[mjevans]

Where I live, in a suburb well within the metro area around the city of Seattle (WA), I am LUCKY to have even one provider that offers at least 25Mbit (per second, down). They thankfully offer 1 Gigabit down packages (very recently, YEARS behind when Seattle got this 'city wide').

HOWEVER, there is ZERO competition so:

    * data-caps
    * horrendous over-charges
    * UPLOAD (on a 1000Mbit line) ~= 30 Mbit

Yes, that's right, the upload is about ONE THIRTIETH, a very small fraction, of the download. Even the BUSINESS plans don't go much higher (while costing tons more, and really only having a support that will say sorry and give a small credit with no actual rush on support; in past experience).

So very much no. The wired-line sector is a natural monopoly that should be like roads to the airport. I should pay a very small bit in taxes for good connections to the global hub, and at said global hub I should have my choice of services from many providers.

[StudentStuff]

70% chance if your in Centurylink's territory they'll offer you 1 Gig for $65 a month (no contract, free modem, price for life, no BS fees) that you can sign up for here: https://www.centurylink.com/home/

If Frontier is your RBOC, they have 300Mbps for $50 iirc in 90% of the non-rural areas they serve. Check https://frontier.com/order-online/plan/package

Comcast is hot garbage, both the offerings I mention are fiber, and the gaps seem to be caused by poor enforcement of the franchise agreements in the relevant locality, eg: Frontier was supposed to have 100% fiber coverage in Kenmore a decade ago, but the city isn't consistently assessing them fines so there is no reason to meet the contract.

Seattle has no universal coverage mandate, but a complex customer income weighting metric to prevent redlining. IMO we negotiated a worse agreement than Kenmore: https://www.seattle.gov/tech/services/cable-service/cable-fr...

[mjevans]

Putting in the address of the HOUSE (that I am renting, but still a house in an OK area of town)...

"Speeds up to 12 Mbps are available in your area!"

[gremlinsinc]

wow, I'd think Seattle being a major tech hub would have better internet. I live in a farming community 15 minutes from the nearest small city (Google: Paragonah Utah), and we have few competitors but for $90 I get 1 gig fiber. There's not many places in utah where you can't get at least 100-300mb.

The state had the forsight to lay tons of conduit a decade or two ago whenever they do road work so that there's plenty of space for bandwidth upgrades and what not across the entire state.

[giobox]

If you’d expect that of Seattle, try looking at domestic broadband options in Silicon Valley.

For huge swathes you can have lovely ancient old ADSL on your copper phone line or Comcast via cable. Oh and all Comcast plans in the Bay Area, regardless of what the marketing says, have a 1 TB bandwidth cap and charge for overages up to 200 dollars on top of your monthly bill, unless you pay them an additional 50 bucks a month to get the _actually_ unlimited option on all of the plans offered. As you can imagine, many of us living here routinely blow through a terabyte of bandwidth - just one cloud connected security camera can eat a third of it easily.

That’s literally it for most people.

[rayiner]

I wonder how much tech peoples’ views are shaped by the fact that Seattle/the Bay Area have such awful broadband. (After all, broadband construction is mostly regulated at the municipal level, and so varies greatly depending on where you live.) Here in Maryland, 60% of people have access to fiber. Verizon in urban/suburban areas, and in rural areas, the state government is building a fiber backbone for municipal fiber networks to hook into. Almost everywhere also has cable. 4G coverage maps are a sea of color. For the most part, our housing prices also aren’t crazy, because we don’t have crazy anti-development/historical preservation laws. I don’t think these things are unrelated. We have pretty good municipal government here, outside Baltimore. I paid well under $500k for a 4BR house on the water, less than 30 minutes to four train stations, and with two fiber providers. Silicon Valley, by contrast, seems like some parody of American municipal mismanagement.

[ethbro]

I try to avoid reaching for comedy, but I couldn't read...

> Silicon Valley, by contrast, seems like some parody of American municipal mismanagement.

And not hear "You were saying something about best intentions?" from Jules in Pulp Fiction.

[dmode]

I am sure there are rural areas in Bay Area that have coverage issues, but definitely not true for urban areas. San Francisco itself has a ton of providers including Monkey Brains, Webpass, Sonic etc. I am on AT&T Fiber and it straight up 1gig up and down at all times.

[rconti]

If by "rural areas" you mean "not literally San Francisco proper", or, in other words, "where almost everyone actually lives".

[StudentStuff]

70% of the city proper has gigabit for $65 a month from Centurylink, OP is out in the fringes where they allowed VDSL2 deployment years ago (whereas Seattle was on ADSL), thus they missed out on upgrades in the last few years. Coverage map for the city proper: https://www.seattle.gov/tech/services/cable-service/cable-fr...

ex-Verizon areas that aren't rural generally have fiber coverage, excepting Finn Hill. They committed to a bunch of smaller suburbs to have 100% fiber coverage by 2008, which mostly got done. Sadly, they only go up to 300mbps symmetrical for $50/month iirc.

[rconti]

1.5 miles from Facebook HQ, in the middle of silicon valley, we JUST got FTTH a few weeks ago.

Cable internet is the only game in town in most of the valley unless you want 40mbit DSL.