Strike down a federal mandate, get 52 mandates to worry about
When ISPs cry foul over fair pricing, states remind them who holds the broadband reins.
😺😺😺😺
Good?
Americans, just so you know, your ISPs do not offer tremendous value, as claimed by USTelecom. If you could see what less than $30 per month gets you in the European Union, you would be furious. Seriously, please get out the guillotines
Not just the EU, but Europe in general really
Not everywhere in the USA is bad, especially in metro areas. I’ve got 10Gbps symmetric for US$40 where I live (San Francisco Bay Area, via Sonic.com), and there’s a few providers throughout the country (mainly smaller ones) that have similar price points. Some cities are lucky and have municipal internet, where the city provides the internet as a non-profit.
Elsewhere in the US, even in cities, you are lucky to get 250 mbit asymmetric for $60
I’m in Canada getting 100mbit down 30 up for $70/month.
Our telecom industry is awful. They have full regulatory capture.
Yikes. I thought america was bad… we usually have 1-2 options for internet and they take advantage. I suspect even when there are more options, collusion is happening.
we have sonic, we left Xfinity of thier outrageous tiered pricing BS with bundling.
Holy shit they have speeds that fast for residential??? I’m over here thinking I’m living like a king with 1Gbps symmetric for $80 in south Texas.
sonic is pretty good 10gps. it appears only on the west coast though. and its 40$, we switched like 10yo ago, when sonic was just new.
cries in $60 for 50/20 D:
australia.
I really wish Australia had rolled out the proper NBN instead of the worse, cheaper initially but more expensive over the long run version. I’m Aussie but I live in the USA now. I’ve heard that even gigabit NBN plans aren’t symmetric? Crazy for a network that’s supposed to be “modern”.
I had ADSL2+ “up to 24Mbps” in Australia back in 2013. In reality it synced at around 7Mbps. I moved to the USA at the end of the year and my apartment had a 600Mbps connection. It was… an experience. So many sites were hosted in the USA at that time too (much cheaper servers and bandwidth than Australia) so latency was much lower in the USA too.
Yup. No symmetric gigabit plans here. But you have to have fttp to get gigabit. Which, thanks to the Liberal government, hardly anyone has.
What’s crazy to me is that some of the big internet companies in the USA are rolling out symmetric 2Gbps over cable using DOCSIS 4.0, by upgrading their equipment. In theory that should be possible over the Optus and Telstra HFC networks in Australia too, yet I haven’t heard of any attempts to do this.
Part of our problem is sprawl…but in a metro there’s no excuse.
While living in Spain I had access to better and cheaper internet through my mobile phone.
Now I’m back I’m Canada and I could cry. Rogers asks 40$ for 15GB of slow as ass interwebs.
We know and we are furious
You can only squeeze every penny out of your population for so long before the majority don’t have any pennies left… With more and more people in the US living paycheck to paycheck and the increase of credit card debt on the raise… We are nearing that point… Trump will probably send this country into the biggest recession in history but it will be ok because they won’t call it one like the last time he was president…
Probably only in certain states. I don’t see most red states implementing something like this.
You mean the great American porn belt?
We can only hope!
Sometimes things that used to be luxuries have become utilities that everyone needs. Broadband is not on the same level as housing or water, but it is undeniable that it is no longer a luxury and deserves to be treated as such.
Agreed. Once upon a time, having water or electricity lines running to a house was considered a luxury, but eventually it became a requirement.
The Trump-appointed Supreme Court decided that the FCC no longer has the authority to classify something like internet as a utility if it isn’t legislated as one, but steps like this are an important way to get that process started and achieve the desired result in spite of that.
There are a lot of municipalities in the area where I live where the city-owned gas/electric departments also provide internet, and I only see that becoming more common over time given how successful their model has been. Internet access is simply a requirement to survive in developed economies these days.
But what about the shareholders whose profit might be slightly constrained?
/s
