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by lumberingjack 2171 days ago
I have friends on the Indiana Ohio border that are only offered ISP from a monopoly, ISP offers one plan $45 mo 60/40mbps. They have the first fiber optic Network ever laid in the country from adelphia cable but Time Warner Cable bought it and turned it off 20 years ago.
5 comments

I just gave Starlink my address as per the email request they sent out today.

I'm currently on an 5Mb down 1Mb up LTE connection with a total data limit of 250Gb/Month for the low price of 100 bucks a month. I do have very low latency < 20ms, but last month my friends kid was over and managed to burn through 95 gigs playing and updating some game called PubG that ended up putting me over my limit and I got to pay an extra 50 bucks for the next tier of usage.

If I get the opportunity to try out Starlink I will be more than happy to do so as it's very frustrating being forced to use an ISP monopoly provider, especially when there is fiber available to properties less than 5 miles away from mine.

You should really check out Visible. Unlimited 4G data, even on the hotspot.

$25 per month if you join a party, which takes about 5 minutes after searching for "Visible Party".

I’ve been playing a bit of pubg recently, it’s included with the Google Stadia streaming gaming service. Fun game!

Stadia can easily burn through tens of GB per hour in bandwidth, and needs low latency, so it’s a good test of my 5G mobile connection. Good thing I have unlimited data!

The median speed is close to 60/5 so despite them getting screwed on fiber that's not even bad for the US. And the price isn't extortionate, even!
60/40mbps isn't bad unless you want to share it with a lot of people (e.g. larger families). Sure, downloads won't be as fast as you'd like them to be but it's enough for 4k streaming so I don't think many people would notice the difference between this and a 200mbit line.
I recently did a substantial speed drop and barely noticed.

When I dropped cable TV and phone 4 months ago, I also dropped my internet speed from the 600 I had, figuring I’d start low and then raise it to what I need.

Options were 25, 100, 200, 300, 600, 1000, or 2000, for 50, 55, 70, 80, 90, 100, or 300 $/month.

I went with 100...and am still there 4 months later. The only times I notice it’s slower than my old 600 is OS and sometimes large app updates. (And for mobile devices, the difference is even less because my WiFi was a lot closer to 100 than 600).

It hasn’t affected working from home at all (I’ve been WFH for a couple years now so have plenty of prior experience with that at 600). I do occasionally need large downloads from work, but I’ve never gotten more than 20 Mbps out of our servers hosted at AWS.

I was worried a bit about upload. Nominally it was 15 for the 600 plan and is 5 for the 100 plan. Comcast over-performs in my area, so actual is about 19 for 600 and 7 for 100. (Download for those two is actually about 620-640 and 124). But the only large uploads I do aren’t very large. They are just large enough that on the old plan I would overlap them with other work rather than wait...so now I just get more other work done during the upload and still don’t really notice the wait. I get the same total work accomplished in the same time as before, just sequenced slightly different.

I thought I might be going to 300 if it turned out that streaming TV ran me into Comcast’s data cap and I needed to go unlimited. That would have been an extra $50/month, so 100 unlimited would be $105/month. But they also had an option where you could get unlimited for much less but only if you rented their modem. Total was $25/month, but it was only available on 300 or faster plans. A 300 plan with the modem/unlimited bundle would be $105/month, same as the 100 plan with my own modem and added unlimited. Still wouldn’t need 300, but if it is the same price as 100 why not?

But it turns out that even in my bingiest COVID lockdown month I only hit about 300 GB. Also, Comcast has since raised the cap from 1000 GB to 1229 GB, and dropped unlimited to $30/month, so I now anticipate staying at 100 indefinitely.

I agree, I have the option of 1000/1000 for £50/month or 150/150 for £25/month. Both unlimited. Despite pushing the connection very hard I ended up downgrading to 150. It's hard to get more than 200mbit on WiFi consistently, and unless you download onto an SSD with ethernet, downloads are constrained by hard drive speeds (especially over USB).
I have family on 6mbps down for somewhere around $70, so that's a pretty decent price for rural internet :p
Both myself and another remote coworker, this is our situation, although it is closer to $60.

6Mbps/768kbps DSL

thats brave!

make sure you have some decent AQM (qos) like cake or fq_codel. isp-gear probably has not. IQRouter was one of the first but there are others https://www.stoplagging.com/

> ISP offers one plan $45 mo 60/40mbps.

I pay $75/month for 30/30. So that sounds like a pretty good deal to me.