[josh2600]

This.

I am insanely embarrassed by the third world telecom infrastructure many Americans have to live with.

100Mbps symmetrical is just on the edge of what telcos can jam into dsl over their existing install base. The goal of the telco is to keep the FCC speed goal at copper limits for as long as possible to avoid paying the fiber they were paid to build in the 90’s.

Om Malik wrote a fantastic book entitled: “Broadbandits” which covers the $750B telecom heist (way back 30 years ago when a single billion was a lot of money for a business).

https://www.amazon.com/Broadbandits-Inside-Billion-Telecom-H...

[5e92cb50239222b]

I live in Kazakhstan and am paying just a little over $10 a month for a 500 Mbit/s symmetrical FTTH link (no caps either). It's even faster and cheaper in Russia (at least it has been until now, I don't know how long it's going to be true since they're sanctioned to the moon). Both countries pretty much have (their own) monopolistic internet providers, and yet. Why do Americans tolerate this bullshit?

[Strom]

When comparing local production prices between different countries it is important to keep local wages in mind. The ISP employees in Kazakhstan are not getting paid US salaries.

To do some quick math, let's take the median monthly salaries of both Kazakhstan and USA, 364,000 KZT ($755) and 3,500 USD per month respectively.

That means that the $10/month 500Mbps symmetrical fiber is about 1.32% of median monthly wage in Kazakhstan. For the US, 1.32% of 3,500 USD is about $46/month.

Looking at the AT&T website, they offer 500Mbps symmetrical fiber for $65/month + taxes. So yes, the US internet is more expensive by about 50%.

However one should still ask - well, maybe AT&T provides better service? I don't know whether AT&T is a better provider than your Kazakhstan ISP, but some points to consider are:

- Can you have a connection uptime of 6 months without interruptions and it's just business as usual and not an achievement? (In Estonia I have router & connection uptime measured in years. When I lived in the US, my Xfinity connection dropped for a few minutes every week.)

- Does the ISP have excellent global peering? Poor peering can result in much higher latencies to international destinations, and also much lower bandwidth. (In Estonia I know all the budget ISPs buy (as opposed to build) their international traffic and oversell it, which means connections across oceans are at quarter of the advertised speeds at peak hours.)

- Is the last mile cabling cost eaten by the ISP, or will they demand you to pay for its building?

[5e92cb50239222b]

> are not getting paid US salaries

Sure, that was implied. All hardware and software used to build networks is imported though, and is bought for 'hard' currency (and a lot of it is needed to build networks in a country with an extreme climate and such low population density).

> Can you have a connection uptime of 6 months without interruptions

I've been using this provider since 2008 (and switched from ADSL to fiber-optics in 2013). It's been pretty great actually, I believe we had two service interruptions in all that time, roughly half-hour each. I don't remember the exact time since the last one happened some years ago.

No idea about 100% stability across many months of use since I don't host anything at home. This sounds like something you'd want if you were getting remotely operated on.

The router keeps the same IP for months, and I've never had the connection break from under me (besides two occasions mentioned above).

> Does the ISP have excellent global peering

Well, it's definitely not going to be as good as what you have in Europe. I mean, look at our geographical location, it's right in the middle of freaking nowhere. I guess it's pretty similar to what they have in NZ, only they are surrounded by water, and we by a thousand miles of steppe.

Last year, I looked at what they paid in Russia to get similar connection speeds. Prices were significantly lower in Moscow and SPb than in Siberia (roughly $5 for 1 Gbit/s versus $5 for 200 Mbit/s IIRC), which makes sense when you think of it. And we're way further down.

Both up and down speeds to US and EU datacenters are stable and close to 100% advertised.

Right now, ping to HN is at 220 ms. Going by the most direct route possible at the speed of light in vacuum, I get 100 ms to that same datacenter (us-west-2). So it's 2.2 times worse than the unreachable ideal. Don't know how much better it could be if we had direct cabling to the US since it's not going to happen for financial reasons.

We have a couple more providers (who seem to have been allowed to the market to make the main one look like less of a monopolist) that are not as popular. They definitely do oversell bandwidth. You'd be lucky to get 10% of what you had paid for, especially on weekends.

> Is the last mile cabling cost eaten by the ISP

You don't pay anything when signing up for the service.

So no, I think US customers are simply getting shafted for their money.

[fomine3]

Mostly agree but add a point: Kazakhstan (or say all country except US) ISPs needs broad international connection to US because many services hosted in the US despite it's CDN era, so transit fee is added, while US ISPs just need national connection.

[leohonexus]

Heh, I guess one thing Borat did learn was how poor US telecom infra is. /s

[toast0]

> 100Mbps symmetrical is just on the edge of what telcos can jam into dsl over their existing install base.

I'm not sure that's going to cover much of their base. I've got a pretty good line, I could probably hit 100M down, it's around 90M now, but not more than 40 or 50M up, it's capped at 16M though, cause fixed profiles :/

Elsewhere near me, there's like a chance of 10M. New technology isn't going to help that, unless it's fiber to the curb; but you might as well go the rest of the way to the premises if you can.

[rejor121]

I’ve never had good internet in America, but my internet has been so good in east Asia. Even japan, which is supposedly worse than other countries, is worlds better than what I ever paid for in the states.

The one exception is China. I could never live there because of their shit internet due to the great firewall

[SamReidHughes]

Who paid them to build fiber and under what contract?

[josh2600]

Telecom act of 1996 paid them to build fiber but they set the speed limits low enough that they could satisfy it with DSL.

There’s new DSL tech that’s ~100mbps, so this is that technique again.

The fatal flaw in 1996, like today, is not pushing for gigabit, and is one of the major reasons the US is a declining global power. Faster internet access is core infrastructure for participation in the 21st century.

[SamReidHughes]

> Telecom act of 1996 paid them to build fiber

Do you have a factual basis for such a statement? Here is the text of the act.

https://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.txt

In fact, the text of the act doesn't mention fiber -- which part involves paying companies to build fiber? -- and one part is very explicit in not referring to a specific form of technology.

> The term `advanced telecommunications capability' is defined, without regard to any transmission media or technology, as high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.

In fact, for a simple sanity-check on the factualness of your statement, we need just one question: If FedGov paid companies to build fiber -- which companies, and how much did it pay each of them?

[politician]

The US is not a declining global power.

[jdhendrickson]

Completely based on the lens through which you are viewing it. I myself am American and have seen the quality of life for the average citizen declining in my life time. If I wasn't a part of the new middle class provided by technology, my children would have a worse life than me, combine that with the recidivism displayed by our judiciary recently and some could definitely argue we are declining. But with a user name like that, you already know all that. You might say our gdp and other metrics still show us as a giant on the world stage, I'm sure there are other metrics we can crow about, Yet it feels like little of that is trickling down to our citizens.

[jl6]

What year would you suggest time-travelling back to in order to enjoy a higher quality of life?