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by tovej 1525 days ago
I'm suspicious of this statement, what you count as Europe, and also of how you've focused on the mean (average), which is heavily affected by large outliers. The median feels more useful in cases like these. Also you haven't even cited your data source.

But even if speeds were equivalent or better in the US, prices in the US are still multiples of European prices for the same service.

1 comments

I'm equally suspicious, made even worse by stating completely factless things like "more robust".

Also what's available and what I'm purchasing is different. I'd pay about 35$ for uncapped 100/100 and that's enough for me. But everywhere where you can get 100 you can also get 1000 for maybe 90$ a month. I don't want 1000 because it's useless for my use case, and I don't have anything to prove so instead of wasting money I'm staying on 100, I think most people are because it's just enough. There's also 250 and 500 inbetween which some might get too.

This is Sweden, which is supposedly 50 Mbit behind the US (x for doubt)

I'd also like to remind you that we have something called net neutrality, so our isps aren't allowed to prioritize speedtesting services any different than anything else.
Net neutrality went out the window the moment Net backbone operators reached for DPI (Deep Packet Inspection), traffic shaping, and QoS (some workloads get prioritized over others).

It's a beautiful ideal to reach for, but it's expensive, because it implies actually investing in infrastructure instead of exec bonuses.

I think that's what we're doing in Sweden and many parts of Europe. I have 1-2 ms to Cloudflare within Stockholm, had 5-6ms 340km away, I highly doubt my traffic goes though inspection steps on the way.

We're also apparently building out train infrastructure quite extensively in Europe, and when you lay down train tracks you lay every other piece of infra down with it.

I'm all for private actors and all that, but not when the actors are allowed to pay politicians to not regulate them.