For me, internet is great (both wired and wireless). For wired, I have a choice of cable and FTTH in my apartment, both cancelable month-by-month and without any bullshit fees ("taxes and surcharges", yeah, believe it or not I also pay taxes and I don't make it your problem, ISP!) beyond the sticker price.
No idea if this is due to competition, regulation, or both; I suspect that at least the "no bullshit fees" part is due to the latter, as I can't imagine major US corporations all somehow collectively dropping them in one region but not the other.
I also don't doubt that it is significantly worse for somebody living elsewhere. Data caps seem to still be a thing for wired access in some places.
Heres a little illustration. I used to work for a multinational company that had its main office in london and a number of satellite offices around the world. We wanted to install decent internet into everywhere so we could begin to manage our data in a more effective way.
London: look for a good offer, phone up a few ISPs, get a quote, work out if we have spare capacity in the building (we did) boom, 1 gigabit install inside a month.
Redwood city: 6 months. we had some sort of shitty T3 line installed as a stopgap. It never reached SLA. I had to phone the NOX, get a report. I then phoned the EMEA president of $large_International_network_provider to complain personally that I had to do the work of half his fucking company to get dailup++ installed. I left before they managed to get actual fibre into the building.
Santa Monica: "we cant install fibre as the previous engineer reported seeing eyes under the building" Try and use a different company. Turns out that there is only that company in santa monica (Can't remember which) Ok, order an upgrade to what we already have. "line is bad needs replacing" cue me having to _fucking fly out_ and manage the fourth attempt at upgrading because the company are such useless fucking pricks.
domestic wise
I am in the suburbs, they've just rolled out fibre to the house. I have 900 meg down with 100(might be more) up for £50 a month. Thats the pricy version with a fixed ipv4 address.
I’m currently doing 6.3/9.1 with 81ms latency on AT&T. I’m seeing Europe averaging 48 Mbps [1], though my experience in Italy and the UK has been far spottier than in America. (Lot of people in this thread confusing home and mobile internet. I get 1Gb/35 for $65 at home, but that’s irrelevant.)
That average looks outdated, and includes a lot of rural and under-developed areas. It also varies a lot per country[1].
Most people in urban areas can get deals like 300-500Mbps for < €30/month. I have symmetric 1Gbps and pay about the same, could get 8Gbps for €80 but have no use for it.
In France, I pay monthly 27.48€ (~$29) for 1Gbps down and 500Mbps up (in theory, in practice, it's more like 500~600Mbps down, 250~300Mbps up). This includes a TV option for 2€ (without it, it's 25.48€).
My provider is SFR (the only one giving access to optical fiber in the small village where I live).
EDIT: I'm talking about home internet. For mobile internet, I pay 19.99€/month for unlimited access (5G), but I haven't done a speedtest.
For comparison, I live in Washington State 50km away from Seattle, and I get 1200 Mbps down and 200 Mbps up (in practice more like 900/100) for $115/month. This is just pure Internet, no TV or anything else.
The ISP that I currently use - Comcast Xfinity - is also the only cable provider in this area. I can get some mobile and satellite options, but they are all more expensive for lower speed and higher latency.
I pay $55 a month for 1gps symmetrical at&t fiber. No caps I normally hit 2TB a month and they've never complained. Somedays I only seem to get like 800mpbs of that gig but it's rare.
Its getting replaced: 50 bucks a month for 10gig fiber.
It's going to cost me 800 ish bucks to set up to take advantage of that (routing, switching, nic's)... I will still come out way ahead before the end of the year.
The GP is comparing the US to the rest of the world, and they're correct: the US (including yours) lags behind other modern countries. Singapore, for reference, offers 500/500 symmetric connections for approximately the same price as you're paying. 2gbps symmetric is less than $200/mo.
You're saying your Internet is fast enough for you, and that's fine and probably correct, but you're still getting slower speeds for higher prices than you should. You're also likely better situated than much of the rest of the country.
If by "the rest of the world" you mean a cherry-picked selection of the most advanced countries, then yes, the US is behind on internet access (and everything else).
It never makes sense to me when people say how the US ranks last among developed countries on a bunch of metrics. Of course, that just means the US is indeed... less developed than those countries. If it's not fair to compare the US to Somalia, it's not fair to compare it to Sweden either. It just is what it is, somewhere between the two development extremes.
How, exactly, are you supposed to compare if not to other countries? There’s no bar for “this is what a developed country’s internet should look like” so the only way to compare is to do it against other countries roughly in the same range as the US.
It’s also entirely factual to say that in comparison to other developed countries, the US lags in internet.
If the US is significantly behind developed countries in practically every category, why do you consider it a developed country? What does “developed” mean?
> other countries roughly in the same range as the US.
The same range of what variable? How do you measure/define this?
Aggressive regulation of large businesses, and local government-run non-profit ISPs to provide a sensible baseline that can be relied upon without being at the whims of private companies.
Not vote for politicians that are ardently anti-consumer and anti-infrastructure? We’re talking about what exists, not who you can call to upgrade your internet :/
That's not really that rare in the USA though? Most decently sized cities have some form of fiber offering that will at-least give you a gig for $50 a month or so.
> Edit: downvoters, what are the problems with U.S. internet?
once you get outside of truly major metro areas, internet access tends to go to shit.
i've got 1G fiber internet in Seattle now, but in Everett ~25M shared access comcast is the best you can do in a lot of places. and it isn't like you need to be surrounded by cows and horses to have bad internet, you can have the boeing factory just down the road, but you're living in a ~100k population city as opposed to a tech hub.
(also that 25M cable modem is going to be twice as expensive as 100M fiber in a major city and at least half the country only has access to DSL at those kinds of costs for anything half usable)
For me, internet is great (both wired and wireless). For wired, I have a choice of cable and FTTH in my apartment, both cancelable month-by-month and without any bullshit fees ("taxes and surcharges", yeah, believe it or not I also pay taxes and I don't make it your problem, ISP!) beyond the sticker price.
No idea if this is due to competition, regulation, or both; I suspect that at least the "no bullshit fees" part is due to the latter, as I can't imagine major US corporations all somehow collectively dropping them in one region but not the other.
I also don't doubt that it is significantly worse for somebody living elsewhere. Data caps seem to still be a thing for wired access in some places.