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by pirate787 1524 days ago
I live in a metro area in the US and thousands of homes in my community do not have land-based broadband options. The US incumbents have totally failed and it isn't because there's a lot of desert in the West and Alaska. I'm sick of this argument which doesn't explain why city dwellers in most places in America have the worst internet in the developed world.
4 comments

I live in the middle of nowhere USA. I'm about 1,000 feet off the road (that only random farms are on, about 20 miles from the small city we're near).

My local ISP trenched fiber to my house for free and provides gig internet for $80/month.

The funny thing is my previous house was in town and I had to settle for 100Mbit for the same price. ISPs are all sorts of messed up.

It’s all about what it costs to upgrade - if a rural ISP has to upgrade copper infrastructure for whatever reason they’ll fiber it.

In the city it’s often just as easy to let what is working continue “working” - a major rollout takes a lot of money.

Yep engineering the new network, pulling permits, hiring the contractor, buying new equipment/lines all cost $$$$$$
Yup, I live in San Francisco proper, and my only choice is Comcast cable. Looks like the current promo pricing for 1200Mbps is around $70/mo, but I can't quickly find what the normal price is. And I assume the uplink is something abysmal like 25Mbps.

(I'm on Comcast's Business service, $250/mo for 1000/35 [long dumb story why]. Most of the time I see under 600 down when checking on speed test sites, and real-world speeds downloading large files rarely exceeds 250. I expect real-world speeds on the non-business service are even worse.)

It's pretty embarrassing that this is the state of things.

Most of San Francisco can be served by Wave (cable). Sonic also has a large presence in San Francisco as well.

Over in Oakland I am paying $40/mo to Sonic for 10Gbps (though I only have equipment to route at 1Gbps at the moment)

I'm also in SF Bay Area and I just had 3 Gbps symmetric fiber installed by Comcast. This is their $299/mo "Gigabit Pro" option. I posted about it on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Comcast_Xfinity/comments/tkmv9y/upd...

There's a benchmark posted there showing that the speed is really as advertised.

I live in a not-very-metro area in the usa and get gigabit fiber for $65/mo.
I'm in Jersey City and have fios, 1gbit for $70 a month