I think this sampling is not good enough. Tikona is not even close to being a major player in India. I am paying 3.5$/month for a 4G connection with 1.5 GB data every day.
While that is a very good price, it is a limit that I would find it hard to keep to having had an uncapped connection.
I pay 14x that price but use 20-120x that data cap.
You use 30-150GB a day on your cell phone? I had unlimited data for a long time and realized I used little.more than half a gigabyte per day unless I was away from home & office (in a different city etc.)
Maybe - the UK seems to be going to give residency to millions of Hong King residents. Even if a small percentage of them take that offer up, that could be a decent population drop.
For all the big companies like ATT, Comcast, their internet prices are based only on how much of a monopoly they have in the local area. When a qualified competitor moves in (if they are even able to after well-funded resistance from the big company) prices become much more competitive. Or at least that's what I've heard many anecdotes of on the internet. Paying $140 for 300/25 internet + TV in Chicago, $10 difference between the 100/200/300/600/gigabit tiers.
Probably some kind of promotional rate situation. My 400/20 Spectrum cable connection is $45 for two years and then goes up to $70. (Edit: indeed they seem to be offering a $39.99 promo rate, marked down from $60 https://www.att.com/offers/advert/fiber/localoffer/)
Also on my last cable account I randomly went on the website to see what their current rates were, and noticed they were offering 2x the speed to new subscribers for the same I was paying. I called to ask about it and they told me the faster plan was the default but that I’d been grandfathered into the slower plan (thanks!), but that they could upgrade me if I wanted. It must be intentional that speeds and prices are super opaque.
Same here, maybe 10 USD cheaper depending on the month.
I looked out because my house is one of the last three that they have fiber going to (aerial). I don't know why they stopped rolling out the fiber halfway down the street, but they did. Luckily for me I was able to get away from terrible Comcast gigabit.
In France, Free just announced up to 5000mbs down and 700mbs up for 40€. Orange has 2000mbs down and 600mbs up for 50€, and may have better peering in general.
And when you have that gear, what is it used for? Obviously businesses can, but a home user? Even with an appetite for movies etc you would have filled your drives in no time.
I do full disk image backups of my half full 1TB OS drive to a HDD every day, and upload archive to remote storage every few nights, so about 1-2 TB a week of uploads.
Then i have my other HDDs backed up once a week, so about 10-20gb of changes a month.
Now i started doing photography as a hobby, and boy, are those raw files large. 24mb each. Last weekend i was on a short trip with friends, 75 GB of raw photos and videos. Gotta back those up, the faster the better.
Because i want to be able to restore latest working state as quickly as possible, which includes all configurations of all my apps without having to fix missing license keys in the windows registry, setup accounts, and other fiddly settings.
I do file backup of my photos, documents, invoices, and other random things I've setup for backup.
It is really 2 Gbps down. However, the Ethernet ports are just 1 Gbps.
So you can't have it on a single device. What it allows is to have 2 computers, each one with their own full 1 GBps link.
In practice, it is mostly useless. I have the 1 GBbs plan on the same provider (Orange) and I generally only get full speed on speed tests, and the only times I use a significant fraction of my bandwidth is on the occasional large download (ex: games).
Free, the other ISP, is known for its ludicrous speeds at the end point but from my experience a few years ago, it is seriously limited by its infrastructure. So you my get 5 Gbps on the local loop, but you will never get these speeds on the greater internet.
Basically, 1Gbps+ fiber makes your internet connection somebody else's problem. The last mile stops being the limiting factor.
Definitely agree with this. Although doing anything else would be way harder (impossible?), straight up comparison of prices after currency conversion is really only of use to tourists.
It doesn't seem to differentiate between FTTC and FTTP fibre which has dramatic differences (74mbit vs gigabit), and most of the UK is still currently stuck with FTTC.
One of my pet peeves is Fibre To The Cabinet being marketed as Fibre.
Yes there's a fibre optic cable in there somewhere, and it terminates a bit closer to my home than old fashioned DSL, but it's still fundementally DSL. It's just a slightly shorter length of copper wire.
If you install fibre between your computer and your router, which connects through dial-up, does it counts as fibre internet?
Demarcation line might come into play, so you could sell that fibre to your neighbour and market it to him as proper fibre, since it's all that he's seeing
In northern Sweden, I get 30 down and I think like 3 or 5 up for approx. 35 USD/mo. I live in a very small town with only DSL available, or I guess 4G modem with very low cap but I don't think I know anybody who uses that.
In the nearest city, I think some friends recently got set up with 300 down for maybe 50-60 USD/mo.
For my family of 4, 30 down is okay most of the time. I don't have teenagers yet though, so ...
A year ago in southern Switzerland I was paying $40 for 10 GB symmetrical fiber. There was a $30 option through another carrier, but you get what you pay for right?
> The only types of Internet service plans shown in the table are DSL and fiber optic cable plans. Since cheapskatesguide.org is about finding the best deals, I excluded from consideration categories of Internet services that I feel are not good deals.
Do you guys have especially rubbish cable internet in the US? Or especially amazing DSL? Cable is much better where I am in Into than DSL.
Not at all. At least around here, cable internet goes up into the hundreds of Mbps, while DSL tops out around...10, I think? for prices that are roughly comparable.
Excluding cable internet seems like a really terrible idea if you're trying to compare prices for broadband in the US.
This has always bothered me, why is DSL so bad in the USA?
A part of that is due to thin twisted-pair phone wiring, which is 26AWG instead of 20AWG (0.8mm)[1] in parts of Europe, and presumably because the country is huge[2], but still, I get better service over DSL than cable (in Eastern Europe) because DSL is a dedicated connection from the CPE (modem) to the DSLAM (the central office equipment).
Most of the congestion is on the last-mile network from the CO to the customer premises, so having a dedicated link provides a much more stable connection.
DOCSIS works over CATV cable, which is a shared medium and it is not electrically isolated, so i.e. neighbors can create noise for you if they have badly designed or malfunctioning devices.
VDSL2 35b supports up to 300/100 Mbps for local loops of 300m or less (984 feet), and 35b degrades gracefully to VDSL2 17a for up to 25/4 Mbps at 1300m (0.8 miles). So, in densely populated areas, xDSL would work much better than cable, for people who want a stable connection.
Cable is oversold and can provide a small percent of the speed sold at any time, but usually 90% of the rated speed is available in off-peak intervals.
Additionally, cable has higher ping times than xDSL and more complex CPE that must be controlled by the ISP (even if you buy your own, the CMTS will reprogram it with a configuration file on boot, and the ISP can open any backdoor they want).
Compared to this, DSL CPE can be bought from anywhere and used on any network without ISP interference because DSL is a dedicated medium so there is no trusted part of CPE needed to limit the speed to the user, compared to cable where the CM must have a "trusted" part that the user can't control which will do access control, encryption and also QoS and speed limiting.
[1] thinner wires have higher attenuation on high frequencies and/or longer distances
[2] sparsely populated area usually means higher average local loop length
The best answer I can give to your opening question is "because the telecom companies are rabidly anti-consumer." They absolutely do not want to upgrade their equipment, since at least the mid-'90s.
For a while, Verizon was neglecting its copper in favour of fibre, at least in densely-populated areas (in sparsely-populated areas, it just neglected its copper in favour of nothing). Now, so far as I can tell, it has a deliberate strategy of abandoning copper to push people onto its wireless service, which has vastly higher margins and much less regulation (and different regulations, where it has them).
Yes, but that [1] is done elsewhere too, yet I do not see this problem.
Just replacing the central office equipment is enough to improve speeds for a larger and larger percentage of users served by the DSLAM in the telephone exchange.
The USA, being a technological superpower for decades, surely has enough resources to replace a few pieces of equipment in the CO and offer users something better.
This is very strange because the new equipment can actually lower costs for the ISP because it is more efficient, easier to manage, more reliable and more compact.
I do not have insight to understand the regulatory landscape and market conditions, however the more I think about it the less of a point I have.
I think you are right about the answer [2], I keep trying to find technical excuses but can't.
This is a sad thing really.
Especially since it costs the same [3] to run the networks in .. [eastern european countries], USA, Russia, Germany, France, Belgium, Australia. No matter the diversity of terrain, the vast scale of the territory, the weather conditions, population density, there is an analogue to USA somewhere, and they don't have it that bad.
[1] neglecting copper in favor of fiber
[2] "because the telecom companies are rabidly anti-consumer."
[3] in general the maintenance and personnel costs may differ due to regulation and market conditions but the equipment costs the same everywhere, and where there is a higher market baseline cost for labor, the ISP can raise the price of services
As a counterpoint to that, Ziply just bought Frontier in my area and now owns all the DSL and FTTH service. They have the worst customer service I have ever experienced. They rolled through and canceled all the autopay, didn't tell us for three months, sent us a letter telling us we didn't have to do anything, and followed that up by sending us no bills or anything until the account was three months past due. Not a single person on their customer service team could refund a $30.00 late fee on an account that had previously been current for 5 years. On top of that when my fiancee was calling every CSR she would get on the phone with would offer to transfer her to the correct department, then hang up. She literally spent a total of 8 hours on the phone over the course of two weeks, so it ended up costing them way more money than they extracted from their little late fee. And their CEO had the unmitigated gall to say they have the best customer service on their website.
In contrast, Comcast/Xfinity have not caused any problems at all for me over the 10+ years I've been a subscriber. Also Comcast was able to give us 300 megabit cable for less than the cost of 75 megabit fiber from Ziply. So it wasn't even comparable.
So yeah, DSL/FTTH might be more technically capable, but it's only as strong as the company providing the service.
Yes, of course customer service is top priority, at least it should be.
In my country, there are people intentionally staying on a cable ISP for their excellent support and the fact they carry non-government non-right-wing channels which are unwanted on other government-controlled ISPs (i.e. CNN affiliate). The cable ISP is slower and more expensive (up to 100% more) than FTTH at the government owned telco, but people really appreciate having problems fixed in a day after one call and not an agonizing process lasting months(!!) that often just ends with them cancelling your contract and waiving the early cancellation fee, and then blacklisting your location from getting service because it is problematic.
Also funnily enough we had that same problem with billing, it lasted for 18 months, during which time no correct bills were sent, no payments were logged and nobody's service was shut off for non-payment. The ISP mostly forgave the debts [1] of all customers because they couldn't keep track of it. I first because a user just as it happened and haven't paid a year due to them messing up my discounted rate and then just telling me not to pay and sending a corrected bill for 1,00 RSD (basically free) because they can't guarrantee they will log the payment properly. Hilarious really.
[1] and reported the biggest lost since 1980s when it was founded, but hey it's government owned, the people will eat the debt haha /s
>Additionally, cable has higher ping times than xDSL
Can you elaborate on this? Is it a difference of one millisecond, a few milliseconds, or tens of milliseconds? Is technical (eg. something baked into the DOCSIS standard), or an implementation thing?
5-20ms[1], if the DSL is set to Fast path (not Interleaved).
The reason is simply because DOCSIS is working on a shared medium so in certain cases you have to wait for others to stop transmitting on your channel so you can transmit + there are much more unpredictable errors due to RF noise caused by having a lot of devices share a "single cable" (it's not REALLY single cable, it's split, but all noise will end up on the one feed to the CMTS) and also it's quite easy to get noise from neighbors.
Noise is often hard to solve (find the source of it), i.e. it's a household with a bad set top box power supply sending low voltage AC into the cable network.
Problems can be solved, and in some cities DOCSIS works very well, but often times it doesn't, and when it doesn't it's really difficult to fix it other than doing a node split (i.e. adding a new CMTS and moving half of the users to it) and proactively putting filters in everyone's house and controlling installations.
Also the promoted speed for DSL is often the max speed you will be capped at, if your connection can attain that speed that is. Where I'm from most ISP's won't sell you a DSL less than 40-50Mbit. But my line only supports up to 15Mbit. So essentially I'm forced to pay for more capacity I can't even use.
German here, there's always been a debate that cable was usually fine for surfing and downloads but often had problems with low latency for games. Also DSL is usually "either it works or it doesn't" and not "ugh, 10% of down/upstream available at night when everyone is watching Netflix. (DSL goes to 50/100 here, usually)
Also the biggest cable providers were historically bad at customer service unless you took the business plan for twice the price. If cable is even available at all (never was available where I lived, in a big city).
My takeaway simply is that it's not about the technology, but the ISP handling it.
> Also DSL is usually "either it works or it doesn't" and not "ugh, 10% of down/upstream available at night when everyone is watching Netflix.
Here in Canada, "cable internet" is (and has been for years) a fiber run to the neighbourhood and/or apartment-building head-end switch, with coax runs up from there to individual dwellings. There really isn't any contention on the bandwidth of the shared coax medium any more. It's like an office that has one Ethernet hub per four-cubicle workgroup, with the hubs all connected to an Ethernet switch. Collision avoidance / channel narrowing, despite being theoretically possible at the hub level, doesn't really come up with so few transmitters connected to each hub.
Interesting. While interested in networking per se, I've never really dug into the "last mile" or how ISPs connect households, except from basic troubleshooting.
I've never lived somewhere where DSL was available and better than cable. The one time I had DSL it was slow and unreliable, standard 30mbps cable was miles better.
At least where I am, cable is better than DSL but still not that good. We are paying for 600 mbps but we never really get any more than 30 mbps no matter how much we complain and conference calls tend to stutter quite a bit.
(US, PacNW) I used DSL whenever available due to it's reliability compared to cable. With cable I'd have outages at least a few times a year (for up to a week) and with DSL I'd have outages once every few years (never more than a day). I always just figured the phone company was used to high uptime requirements (critical communications infrastructure) while cable was not (optional entertainment).
When I last had DSL (2016) I had 40mbs down/5mbs up. Now I have fiber at 1gbs symmetrical for $65/mo.
I had 4Mbps DSL once. Then the line went bad and I was moved to a crummy pair that could only muster 2Mbps. All within 1000ft of a CO with a straight shot through an old railroad right of way.
It's not viable to look only at raw price, because these ISP are amongst the most aggressive price marketing companies. They have bundles, they have 3, 4, sometimes 6 months promotions for new users, they negotiate a lot, etc
The idea that any particular internet service is available at some price/speed in "The USA" is just wrong on the face of it. ISP availability varies on a house by house basis, let alone individual streets/towns/counties/states.
A datapoint for Serbia:
(prices are sampled per tier, there are more combinations possible)
Telekom Srbija (incumbent national provider)
(note: all prices with 24 month contract, 6.48$/mo mandatory landline fee should be added, VAT is included)
- 20/4 Mbps on VDSL2 - 16.69$/mo
- 100/10 Mbps on VDSL2 - 23.58$/mo
- 200/80 Mbps on GPON - 33.40$/mo
- 1000/400 Mbps on GPON - 88.41$/mo
Orion telekom (alternative provider)
(note: all prices with 24 month contract, VAT is included)
- 10/1 Mbps on WISP/ADSL2+ - 14.73$/mo
- 100/10 Mbps on VDSL2 - 18.66$/mo
"Special" offer without contract for GPON:
- 200/10 Mbps - 9.83$/mo
- 500/20 Mbps - 14.74$/mo
- 1000/50 Mbps - 24.57$/mo
Average monthly wage is 589$, minimum is 294$, yearly minimum 3528$, average 7068$.
For fast and cheap you can't overlook Romania, in the cities I've been in, the speed has been exceptional and reliable (which is more than I can say for most British internet, excluding the FTTH our current flat has).
Unlimited data mobile 4G costs 100UAH per month (~9 EUR / ~$11 USD). Fast enough that a 300GB backup/recovery is no problem.
Home internet I don't actually pay for (I live in a rental), but the current plan costs the owner 200 UAH per month (~6 EUR / ~$7 USD), "gigabit port", unlimited data (realistic speed is up to 250 up/down).
Pretty sure there is some kind of "combo deal" for both, and I think the home internet price includes TV.
At these low prices, I'm not really interested in shopping around or checking the details of what I'm actually paying for - it's all incredibly cheap and fast enough.
Notice the price in Japan, which is an island and so all in/out-bound traffic has to go through undersea cables. Similar story for South Korea, which for all purposes is also basically an island.
It's actually not even entirely uncommon for people to not have dedicated home internet and just get unlimited, unmetered, mobile service and tether when at home or use a wireless puck -- like bandwidth heavy users of streaming video.
The last time we were in those areas, our AirBnBs also didn't have home internet/Wifi. The hosts just provided a puck that we were allowed to take with us wherever we went and just tether to it while in a backpack. Even though we have Google Fi, it saved a ton on mobile data and offered full 4g data speeds literally every place we went.
Wow, where exactly can I get those prices? I'm in downtown SF and it's $80 not including tax for 200x20 cable. I also don't have the rental fee because I argued with them through three hours and two of my own modems until they finally auth'd my MAC address.
This is the best/cheapest connection I have had; my last connection in NY was 20x5 for $96/mo, also with my own modem. The cable company often tries to sell me a contract TV plan, in exchange for a small temporary package discount, but I un-want TV, so this is not appealing. Also, I hear that in some countries you can't advertise prices that omit tax and surcharges, but here you can.
So I think the US prices in the table are basically fake, where the real prices are about ~2x in my experiance. Just curious whether the prices in other countries are real.
Like can you really get internet for the equivalent of 30-40USD/mo?
SF and NYC are two of the most regulated and taxed cities, so probably safe to say the are on the high side. I'm in Ohio, internet is around $50/month, could be cheaper if I wanted less bandwidth
This article's dubiousness feels like the news effect, where if the news reports on something in your domain then you can tell it's complete garbage, but when they switch topics they're suddenly reputable again.
I'm doubtful that any of these prices are representative of what the majority of the population has access to.
101 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadHK$138/m (US$17.80) for 1 gigabit (symmetric) fiber HK$160/m (US$20.64) for unlimited LTE deprioritized after 20gb
https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/uk-chinas-sec...
Also on my last cable account I randomly went on the website to see what their current rates were, and noticed they were offering 2x the speed to new subscribers for the same I was paying. I called to ask about it and they told me the faster plan was the default but that I’d been grandfathered into the slower plan (thanks!), but that they could upgrade me if I wanted. It must be intentional that speeds and prices are super opaque.
I looked out because my house is one of the last three that they have fiber going to (aerial). I don't know why they stopped rolling out the fiber halfway down the street, but they did. Luckily for me I was able to get away from terrible Comcast gigabit.
What do you mean?
Now i started doing photography as a hobby, and boy, are those raw files large. 24mb each. Last weekend i was on a short trip with friends, 75 GB of raw photos and videos. Gotta back those up, the faster the better.
You can also use versionning when you sync your files.
I do file backup of my photos, documents, invoices, and other random things I've setup for backup.
Edit: add more info
So you can't have it on a single device. What it allows is to have 2 computers, each one with their own full 1 GBps link.
In practice, it is mostly useless. I have the 1 GBbs plan on the same provider (Orange) and I generally only get full speed on speed tests, and the only times I use a significant fraction of my bandwidth is on the occasional large download (ex: games).
Free, the other ISP, is known for its ludicrous speeds at the end point but from my experience a few years ago, it is seriously limited by its infrastructure. So you my get 5 Gbps on the local loop, but you will never get these speeds on the greater internet.
Basically, 1Gbps+ fiber makes your internet connection somebody else's problem. The last mile stops being the limiting factor.
Consumer grade 10Gbit ethernet and fiber NICs exist, and for fairly cheap too.
From https://lafibre.info/free-les-news/keynote-freebox-pop/.
Yes there's a fibre optic cable in there somewhere, and it terminates a bit closer to my home than old fashioned DSL, but it's still fundementally DSL. It's just a slightly shorter length of copper wire.
then again there would be practically no fibre penetration without this "hack" ;-)
In the nearest city, I think some friends recently got set up with 300 down for maybe 50-60 USD/mo.
For my family of 4, 30 down is okay most of the time. I don't have teenagers yet though, so ...
Most expensive ~100€/month ( Telenet: internet + TV )
Do you guys have especially rubbish cable internet in the US? Or especially amazing DSL? Cable is much better where I am in Into than DSL.
Excluding cable internet seems like a really terrible idea if you're trying to compare prices for broadband in the US.
Edit: units
A part of that is due to thin twisted-pair phone wiring, which is 26AWG instead of 20AWG (0.8mm)[1] in parts of Europe, and presumably because the country is huge[2], but still, I get better service over DSL than cable (in Eastern Europe) because DSL is a dedicated connection from the CPE (modem) to the DSLAM (the central office equipment).
Most of the congestion is on the last-mile network from the CO to the customer premises, so having a dedicated link provides a much more stable connection.
DOCSIS works over CATV cable, which is a shared medium and it is not electrically isolated, so i.e. neighbors can create noise for you if they have badly designed or malfunctioning devices.
VDSL2 35b supports up to 300/100 Mbps for local loops of 300m or less (984 feet), and 35b degrades gracefully to VDSL2 17a for up to 25/4 Mbps at 1300m (0.8 miles). So, in densely populated areas, xDSL would work much better than cable, for people who want a stable connection.
Cable is oversold and can provide a small percent of the speed sold at any time, but usually 90% of the rated speed is available in off-peak intervals.
Additionally, cable has higher ping times than xDSL and more complex CPE that must be controlled by the ISP (even if you buy your own, the CMTS will reprogram it with a configuration file on boot, and the ISP can open any backdoor they want).
Compared to this, DSL CPE can be bought from anywhere and used on any network without ISP interference because DSL is a dedicated medium so there is no trusted part of CPE needed to limit the speed to the user, compared to cable where the CM must have a "trusted" part that the user can't control which will do access control, encryption and also QoS and speed limiting.
[1] thinner wires have higher attenuation on high frequencies and/or longer distances
[2] sparsely populated area usually means higher average local loop length
The best answer I can give to your opening question is "because the telecom companies are rabidly anti-consumer." They absolutely do not want to upgrade their equipment, since at least the mid-'90s.
For a while, Verizon was neglecting its copper in favour of fibre, at least in densely-populated areas (in sparsely-populated areas, it just neglected its copper in favour of nothing). Now, so far as I can tell, it has a deliberate strategy of abandoning copper to push people onto its wireless service, which has vastly higher margins and much less regulation (and different regulations, where it has them).
Just replacing the central office equipment is enough to improve speeds for a larger and larger percentage of users served by the DSLAM in the telephone exchange.
The USA, being a technological superpower for decades, surely has enough resources to replace a few pieces of equipment in the CO and offer users something better.
This is very strange because the new equipment can actually lower costs for the ISP because it is more efficient, easier to manage, more reliable and more compact.
I do not have insight to understand the regulatory landscape and market conditions, however the more I think about it the less of a point I have.
I think you are right about the answer [2], I keep trying to find technical excuses but can't.
This is a sad thing really.
Especially since it costs the same [3] to run the networks in .. [eastern european countries], USA, Russia, Germany, France, Belgium, Australia. No matter the diversity of terrain, the vast scale of the territory, the weather conditions, population density, there is an analogue to USA somewhere, and they don't have it that bad.
[1] neglecting copper in favor of fiber
[2] "because the telecom companies are rabidly anti-consumer."
[3] in general the maintenance and personnel costs may differ due to regulation and market conditions but the equipment costs the same everywhere, and where there is a higher market baseline cost for labor, the ISP can raise the price of services
In contrast, Comcast/Xfinity have not caused any problems at all for me over the 10+ years I've been a subscriber. Also Comcast was able to give us 300 megabit cable for less than the cost of 75 megabit fiber from Ziply. So it wasn't even comparable.
So yeah, DSL/FTTH might be more technically capable, but it's only as strong as the company providing the service.
In my country, there are people intentionally staying on a cable ISP for their excellent support and the fact they carry non-government non-right-wing channels which are unwanted on other government-controlled ISPs (i.e. CNN affiliate). The cable ISP is slower and more expensive (up to 100% more) than FTTH at the government owned telco, but people really appreciate having problems fixed in a day after one call and not an agonizing process lasting months(!!) that often just ends with them cancelling your contract and waiving the early cancellation fee, and then blacklisting your location from getting service because it is problematic.
Also funnily enough we had that same problem with billing, it lasted for 18 months, during which time no correct bills were sent, no payments were logged and nobody's service was shut off for non-payment. The ISP mostly forgave the debts [1] of all customers because they couldn't keep track of it. I first because a user just as it happened and haven't paid a year due to them messing up my discounted rate and then just telling me not to pay and sending a corrected bill for 1,00 RSD (basically free) because they can't guarrantee they will log the payment properly. Hilarious really.
[1] and reported the biggest lost since 1980s when it was founded, but hey it's government owned, the people will eat the debt haha /s
Can you elaborate on this? Is it a difference of one millisecond, a few milliseconds, or tens of milliseconds? Is technical (eg. something baked into the DOCSIS standard), or an implementation thing?
The reason is simply because DOCSIS is working on a shared medium so in certain cases you have to wait for others to stop transmitting on your channel so you can transmit + there are much more unpredictable errors due to RF noise caused by having a lot of devices share a "single cable" (it's not REALLY single cable, it's split, but all noise will end up on the one feed to the CMTS) and also it's quite easy to get noise from neighbors.
Noise is often hard to solve (find the source of it), i.e. it's a household with a bad set top box power supply sending low voltage AC into the cable network.
Problems can be solved, and in some cities DOCSIS works very well, but often times it doesn't, and when it doesn't it's really difficult to fix it other than doing a node split (i.e. adding a new CMTS and moving half of the users to it) and proactively putting filters in everyone's house and controlling installations.
[1] more on DOCSIS compared to DSL
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_VDSL_and_VDSL2_deploym...
VDSL supports at least 55Mb/s down.
Also the biggest cable providers were historically bad at customer service unless you took the business plan for twice the price. If cable is even available at all (never was available where I lived, in a big city).
My takeaway simply is that it's not about the technology, but the ISP handling it.
Here in Canada, "cable internet" is (and has been for years) a fiber run to the neighbourhood and/or apartment-building head-end switch, with coax runs up from there to individual dwellings. There really isn't any contention on the bandwidth of the shared coax medium any more. It's like an office that has one Ethernet hub per four-cubicle workgroup, with the hubs all connected to an Ethernet switch. Collision avoidance / channel narrowing, despite being theoretically possible at the hub level, doesn't really come up with so few transmitters connected to each hub.
DSL was only ever in the 3mbps down range, but cable easily hits the 100 range.
When I last had DSL (2016) I had 40mbs down/5mbs up. Now I have fiber at 1gbs symmetrical for $65/mo.
USA Verison - $39.99 200 Fiber
Telekom Srbija (incumbent national provider) (note: all prices with 24 month contract, 6.48$/mo mandatory landline fee should be added, VAT is included) - 20/4 Mbps on VDSL2 - 16.69$/mo - 100/10 Mbps on VDSL2 - 23.58$/mo - 200/80 Mbps on GPON - 33.40$/mo - 1000/400 Mbps on GPON - 88.41$/mo
Orion telekom (alternative provider) (note: all prices with 24 month contract, VAT is included) - 10/1 Mbps on WISP/ADSL2+ - 14.73$/mo - 100/10 Mbps on VDSL2 - 18.66$/mo "Special" offer without contract for GPON: - 200/10 Mbps - 9.83$/mo - 500/20 Mbps - 14.74$/mo - 1000/50 Mbps - 24.57$/mo
Average monthly wage is 589$, minimum is 294$, yearly minimum 3528$, average 7068$.
No alternatives - unless you call $70/month DSL a competitor.
No Fios available :(
E.g. https://www.digiromania.ro/servicii/internet/internet-fix/fi...
I’ve had this package for 6 years at least, in 3 different cities. It’s been the same everywhere.
Unlimited data mobile 4G costs 100UAH per month (~9 EUR / ~$11 USD). Fast enough that a 300GB backup/recovery is no problem.
Home internet I don't actually pay for (I live in a rental), but the current plan costs the owner 200 UAH per month (~6 EUR / ~$7 USD), "gigabit port", unlimited data (realistic speed is up to 250 up/down).
Pretty sure there is some kind of "combo deal" for both, and I think the home internet price includes TV.
At these low prices, I'm not really interested in shopping around or checking the details of what I'm actually paying for - it's all incredibly cheap and fast enough.
It's actually not even entirely uncommon for people to not have dedicated home internet and just get unlimited, unmetered, mobile service and tether when at home or use a wireless puck -- like bandwidth heavy users of streaming video.
The last time we were in those areas, our AirBnBs also didn't have home internet/Wifi. The hosts just provided a puck that we were allowed to take with us wherever we went and just tether to it while in a backpack. Even though we have Google Fi, it saved a ton on mobile data and offered full 4g data speeds literally every place we went.
That way, I kept one of my couch surfing online for a month. It hardly cost me anything, but it was invaluable to him when he hitchhiked for a month.
Even better on a service like fast.com
That sounds great, but considering the average salary is about €1500/m it’s actually really shit.
This is the best/cheapest connection I have had; my last connection in NY was 20x5 for $96/mo, also with my own modem. The cable company often tries to sell me a contract TV plan, in exchange for a small temporary package discount, but I un-want TV, so this is not appealing. Also, I hear that in some countries you can't advertise prices that omit tax and surcharges, but here you can.
So I think the US prices in the table are basically fake, where the real prices are about ~2x in my experiance. Just curious whether the prices in other countries are real.
Like can you really get internet for the equivalent of 30-40USD/mo?
I'm doubtful that any of these prices are representative of what the majority of the population has access to.
Ting sells 5 Mbps symmetric for $19/mo.