Nice. Having read hacker news for years, I remember a lot of comments from angry Americans who were offended by Europeans mocking them about their broadband prices, and telling them that they were being screwed by big American telcos who formed an monopolising alliance artificially keeping prices up.
The comments used to range from "the country is just too big, the infrastructure work doesn't compare" to "European broadband infrastructure is paid by the states because of socialist-type taxation".
And finally, after years of municipalities fighting big telco, it is becoming ultra clear that yes Comcast, TWC and co have been screwing the American people for a looooong time.
And hopefully this is only the beginning, prices still have a long way to go!
2002 I'm in high school and my ISP is Adelphia they lay fiber to my parents door I'm thinking oh shit I'm about to get fiber over 56k modem. One month later Adelphia is in chaos mode over the internal corruption allegations, noone answers the phone there. I have to do a who is look up to find the server room phone number to fix and issue"how did you get this number!?". one year later big telecom is backing the government to prosecute Adelphia. 2006 TWC buys the Adelphia network and rips any working fiber parts off the darkfiber network and sells it. Still to this day my whole street and most the county has a new darkfiber network and noone has ever used it. I'm still stuck with max speed of 70/5 for $100 here. There might be some corruption.
>I remember a lot of comments from angry Americans who were offended by Europeans mocking them about their broadband prices, and telling them that they were being screwed by big American telcos who formed an monopolising alliance artificially keeping prices up.
This is from a small subset of Americans that are always looking for ways to defend large companies and argue against anything that may provide competition to the. It's certainly not the majority; I suspect that it's from employees of these companies that believe the standard company line.
This American, having worked for a small dialup ISP in high school and seeing the dirty tricks telecoms pull, was always with the other Americans that fight the propaganda from large incumbents that carved out geographic chunks of monopolies.
> And hopefully this is only the beginning, prices still have a long way to go!
Monthly non-promo rate for gigabit fiber:
Stockholm - Telia - 999 Swedish Krona (~$125)
London - HyperOptic - 60 Pounds (~$80-90)
Zurich - iWay - 79 Swiss Francs (~$80)
New York - Verizon - $80-90.
It's not clear to me that there is much room to go down in countries with similar cost of labor. (Keep in mind that median household income in France is about the same as Choctaw County, Alabama).
Small village in Serbia, 100 GB LTE for $10, or unlimited (genuinely unlimited, since it's "expensive" so nobody uses it) LTE for $30. Vip mobile, https://www.vipmobile.rs/privatni/internet/vikend_net This is even without a contract!
The speeds are about 100-120 Mbps download and 30-40 Mbps upload, ping is about 10 ms to google.rs.
Note: I don't work for Vip mobile and don't get paid for this, I just like their service, a lot.
For that same twenty bucks you can get uncapped and unlimited 4G in Finland. Finland has 1/25 the population density of New Jersey. What was your point again?
My point was that Taiwan has about 20x the population density of the US. The higher a population density, the cheaper it is to deliver broadband per capita.
And what's your point? Are you saying that population density is not correlated with cost of broadband infrastructure per capita because there exists an outlier?
Unlimited LTE through T-Mo, including unlimited talk and text, is $70 including taxes. The closest DNA plan seems to be 35 euros ($43): https://www.dna.fi/documents/753910/853456/DNA_Liittymahinna.... But median household income in the U.S. is 50% higher than in Finland. Adjusted for that,[1] the U.S. price is about $47.
[1] Cell service isn't like an iPhone, where it's made in China wherever you buy it. U.S. cellular providers pay U.S. rents for tower sites and U.S. salaries for the skilled labor to install and maintain them.
You misread the price list, that's not the cheapest unlimited text, talk and data plan from DNA.
Anyway the cheapest list price for unlimited text, talk and data is from Globetel at 22,85€. https://globetel.fi/liittymät
However, nobody pays list prices, there are always specials as the cell phone companies battle each other for market share. The cheapest offer for unlimited and uncapped 4G is currently 2,90€ per month.
I didn't pick the cheapest plan, but the closest. There is a cheaper DNA plan but that's limited to 50 mbits, while T-Mo's service is not bandwidth limited. Also, Globetel seems to be what we'd call, in the U.S., an MVNO (it uses Telia's network). There are U.S. MVNOs with cheaper prices too.
The exercise here isn't finding a good cell plan, it's comparing service in different countries. Pointing to discounts or to MVNOs that may have service limitations makes it hard to draw a fair comparison.
If the point is comparing service in different countries then you can't just pick a single high-end plan and say these things are equal.
I will concede that including discounts make things tricky, even if they are an integral part of the market, but by what measure should MVNOs be overlooked? Unlike in the US, MVNOs in other countries generally have the same access to the network as the MVO service arm.
The fact remains that in Finland you can get a real uncapped and unlimited 4G plan for about twenty bucks. Everything unlimited for under thirty. And capped 4G plans for under ten bucks.
By what measure does the US come even close?
EDIT: for clarification the above prices are all list prices from MVOs, with the exception of the everything unlimited which is from an MVNO. The equivalent MVO plans are a few euro more.
And where i live in Texas (not a small city by far), I pay $90 for 200/20 (with my own modem) from spectrum (was TWC). The big change with spectrum has been removal of any tiers above 100/10. The 300/20 tier introduced about 5 years ago apparently still exists but you have to call and request it and there is something like a $200 connection charge, and it goes for about $110 a month.
About half way across the city there is some competition, and you can get Gigabit from a couple different providers (for about $100), but the service is really isolated to a few neighborhoods and even companies like AT&T won't even tell you which neighborhoods have the service if you happen to be looking for a house/apartment.
What is silly, is that there are a bunch of fiber providers in texas covering the little towns. For example hill country telephone coop https://www.hctc.net/resources/ (which actually has service maps) has a symetric gigabit plan for $200 in a bunch of towns with populations less than 10k..
We now have Spectrum too. It seems the trend is now to only super fast and expensive plans but the cheaper plans are being eliminated. The cheapest one is now $70 with nothing cheaper. I don't need 300/20 at home and really don't want to spend $70.
I had Everyday Low Price internet service (3Mbit down, 1Mbit up) with Time Warner, before the merger. I just did some reading online, and at least in some areas, Spectrum is still required to offer ELP service as a condition of the merger, though they do not advertise it; you have to specifically ask for it. One comment said they are only required to offer it until March 2019. Dunno if that's true or not.
Spectrum raised the price (with no notice) to $19.95 a few months ago - a 33% increase for this plan. In fairness, they also raised the speed prior to that around 10%, which of course was heavily advertised. The great thing about ELP, and the reason I switched to it, is I got sick and tired of calling TWC every year to renegotiate my rate. They bumped my 30/5 service from $55/mo to $65/mo, I called 3 months in a row, they said they took care of it, gave me a $10 credit a month or two, but kept billing the new rate. Their final offer was $59.95/mo. I just got sick of talking to them and went to $14.95/mo. The great thing about ELP is that it is a non-promotional rate, so I didn't have to call them anymore.
The hilarious thing is, after I switched to ELP, I got offers every week to upgrade to 30/5 for $49.95/mo, but I didn't care anymore at that point.
3/1 service still allows streaming Netflix and Amazon TV at 720p, though with the recent Net Neutrality neutering, I don't know how long it will be before Spectrum inserts artificial delays to make 3/1 unusable for TV streaming. If they do, I've had it and will switch to reading books for entertainment.
Spectrum's lowest-priced non-promotional service here (Louisville, KY area) is $65/mo. To get $40/mo, you have to bundle with phone or TV, getting you back up over $60/mo. To get $30/mo pricing, you have to bundle with both tv and phone, getting you up to $90/mo. Who wants a landline these days? It's just a pricing gimmick.
That was the game with TW. Cut your service to the bare minimum, then they would offer you some year long special at 1/2 the cost of the regular rates.
You could even do this over the phone most of the time. I would call and tell them the $80 they were charging me was to much that I wanted Internet Basics (or whatever they were calling the deal they had made with the city to offer an extremely inexpensive tier). Frequently they would initially deny such a thing existed, then they would transfer me to someone who would be able to setup the $10 a month plan.
From that point they would make all kinds of incredible offers. They would even send me mailers for basic cable for free if I added home phone service for $12 a month (or some such). 12 Months later they would start to slowly raise the rates (I guess trying to apply the boiling frog theory) and the offers would cease.
Apparently spectrum doesn't want to play these games.
I also have the 3/1 plan for $15. It's great value but I wouldn't mind a little more speed. But the next level they have now is $70 which is too much for what I need. I bet a lot people who would be fine with around 20MB have a more expensive plan because that's all that's offered.
Gigabit fiber in Stockholm is more like $70-90 depending on provider/connection. Telia being the former monopoly with a strong brand and a tier 1 provider is more or less the most expensive broadband you can buy. Symmetrical gigabit is of course also more expensive than 1000/100, 100/100 or 100/10. Prices are still a problem, but not quite that bad.
Stockholm is a great point of reference because it's one of the least "distorted." The municipal dark fiber provider doesn't receive any public subsidies, but also doesn't have public obligations (universal service, cross-subsidizing service for low-income people, building out to all neighborhoods, etc.). It charges what it needs to in order to have a sustainable network, and passes those costs along to ISPs such that the ultimate price of access is highly reflective of the "real costs" of building and operating a fiber network.
Stokab ultimately achieved 90% coverage by building out in a demand-driven way (though it took 16 years, compared to the 3-5 year timeline typically imposed in the U.S.). Which is how everything else works: at first only rich people had smart phones, now everyone does.
Universal service is an admirable goal, but the implementation is economically nonsensical. It is, in essence, a tax on telecom service. In the case of the universal service fund, it's an explicit tax. In the case of build-out requirements, it's an implicit tax: instead of taxing an ISP in cash, you're compelling it to provide a service it would not otherwise provide.
But it makes no sense to impose industry-specific taxes on telecom service. It's not like gasoline or alcohol, which warrant taxation to discourage the negative externalities they create. You tax industries that you want to discourage, not ones you want to encourage.
The downside of this economic distortion is that it suppresses competition and entrenches incumbents. There is no "minimal viable product" if you're starting an ISP in Baltimore. There is no sniping away at an incumbents' highest-margin markets. You end up not being allowed to use the tactics that startups in other industries use to take on incumbents.
Contrast how Sweden approaches broadband deployment in rural areas. It simply gives rural residents a tax credit to subsidize construction of a fiber line. It's the same way we approach other forms of welfare. We don't require Whole Foods to build stores in poor neighborhoods. We give direct aid in the form of SNAP and WIC benefits.
I haven't checked the rest, but my fibre in France (provide d by Free.fr) is worth 30 euros/months with no subscription required (as in I can cancel anytime for 0 fee).
Washington, DC: $50/mo + tax, gigabit. Promo of 2 mos free brings it to $41/mo. http://www.rcn.com I've been very happy with it, aside from upgrading my modem from docsis 3 to 3.1.
But 99% of home bb users don't do that you want professional level service on a consumer service that is not and never will be designed (cost reasons) to replace business service.
I have gig symmetric for $79.99. not a promotional rate, no caps.
Edit: the reason it costs more for symmetric with some ISPs has very little to do with "cost reasons" and very much to do with market segmentation. It's the same reason math coprocessors used to cost extra, even though it was on every package already. If a small group will be the only users and will pay extra, then make a separate SKU which includes it, call it business/pro/enterprise and charge a premium. It's profit maximizing pure and simple. The super obvious check is that there are ISPs which compete on friendlyness and don't do this. They're not special, they just make less money.
Looks like completion at work Verizon Fios charges far more than that for lower speeds in MD and VA. However, NYC's is still twice what it costs in many cities around the world.
I'm not sure whether those other "cities around the world" are a fair comparison. Install and operating expenses for fiber are dominated by labor costs, and skilled labor in the U.S. is expensive. The median adjusted household income in the U.S. is 90% higher than in Spain, and 40% higher than in France. That's why I used London and Zurich as points of reference, rather than say Barcelona (where, as you point out, you can get gigabit for under $45/month).
The plan is technically $195 monthly with a ton of “special bonus discounts.” Existing customers aren’t allowed to sign up at all yet, and the price will be higher when they can.
That article from almost a year ago (which was just mindless regurgitation of the ars Technica piece which was also wrong) was not reflective of reality. It actually wasn't even correct when it was written, but you had to know to ask for the lower rate.
Don't ask PR people sales questions. Call sales, be friendly, you'll get the real price. Call PR or sound like an I-Hate-ISPs jerk, pay the jerk tax.
I'm in PDX with the same speed and rate. I have Wave Broadband. I don't think it is available everywhere - possibly only in condo and apartment buildings.
Paris - 1GB - 230 TV channels- Unlimited calls to landlines in 110 countries and mobile for 10 of those countries - High-end multimedia modem with 4k capabilities - 40euros (~$50)
If you don't want all that there are fiber offers for about $25
Sydney - 90 - $60AUD (~$50) in a country as big as America with 10% of it's population
I'm really curious what the oversubscription rates are, that to me was always the big question around cheap internet access. I have 100/100 FiOS, and I get that all day every day for less than $80.
Note (might not be obvious to all): Google Fiber is available in only a couple of places and expansion seems to have stopped. In the USA, symmetric gigabit speed is very rare and typically very expensive.
AT&T offered me symmetrical gigabit for $80 /month and 100/100 for $40 /month. This is in Fishers, IN and only available in a small slice of the city.
I stuck with comcast because uverse tv sucks and they took over 3 weeks to get me hooked up when I moved. Comcast was same day hookup. I get 100/10 for about $70.
It’s effectively like a compromise between big telco and the government: “we’ll open access to broadband, if you allow us to consolidate at the top of the market.”
Yet the cost is simply shifting to cellular data plans, a market with equally high barriers to entry dominated by even fewer players. Incidentally, the cellular company and broadband company are often one and the same, thanks especially to recent consolidations.
Most of these telecoms realize broadband is a higher cost investment for lower return than cellular. So with their left hand, they’re opening up broadband. But with their right, they’re strengthening their hold on cellular. Really they’re unloading a cost center onto the public, as they attempt to move beyond the past and optimize for the future.
>"Having read hacker news for years, I remember a lot of comments from angry Americans who were offended by Europeans mocking them about their broadband prices, and telling them that they were being screwed by big American telcos who formed an monopolising alliance artificially keeping prices up"
Firstly in general people don't like to be mocked.
"A lot" of comments? Really? By a lot you mean a small handful?
Lastly the idea that Americans especially those who read HN would be even remotely unaware that they were being screwed by their well-known telecom duopoly is patently absurd. I'm pretty sure no HN reader ever needed someone from Europe to tell them they were being "screwed" by Big Telecom.
You're correct on price, you're very wrong on the actual infrastructure and its performance.
The US has caught up and surpassed Europe. It is in fact questionable if the US was ever behind, it has had faster speeds than Germany, Italy, Russia, Poland, Spain and France for 20 years. Have you seen how slow average speeds are in countries like France and Italy? They're far behind.
The US average broadband speed is faster than all but five or six small European nations currently. US broadband distribution above 15mbps is also greater than all but a few small European nations.
You're also generalizing to about as great an extreme as you possibly can (Scandinavia is not all of Europe), given how far behind broadband speeds are in the majority of Europe compared to the US.
If the US approach failed so miserably, how come the vast majority of Europe is so slow? Once you get outside of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Switzerland, and Finland, speeds begin to collapse.
There are ~750 million people in the European Union, about ~710 million of those live in nations with slower average speeds and lower broadband distribution than the US.
If we're comparing something more like US states versus small European countries, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, and Rhode Island have avg broadband speeds on par with the fastest small countries in Europe.
Countries the US beats on average speeds and 15mbps distribution: France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Netherlands, Britain, Ireland, Spain, Austria, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Greece, Romania, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Lithuania
Your own links confirm OP’s point. In the first link (Akamai) the US is listed above Romania, and in the second (Speedtest.net) its below. But in both lists, the US is above the big EU countries (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, which comprise most of the EU population).
I didn't say anything about speed though... I'm just saying prices have been artificially high, and the fact that municipalities have needed to take the matter in their own hands is a proof that the whole thing was pretty bad.
The comments used to range from "the country is just too big, the infrastructure work doesn't compare" to "European broadband infrastructure is paid by the states because of socialist-type taxation".
And finally, after years of municipalities fighting big telco, it is becoming ultra clear that yes Comcast, TWC and co have been screwing the American people for a looooong time.
And hopefully this is only the beginning, prices still have a long way to go!