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Ask HN: I'm fed up with my ISP options, is this really all there is?

8 points by Zikes ↗ HN
I'm in an area that currently only has two competing consumer ISPs: Cox Cable and AT&T U-Verse, and I've had major issues with both.

On Cox I'm only able to achieve a quarter of the bandwidth I pay for and they have unreasonably low data caps (and the connection quality is none too impressive, to boot). On AT&T they monitor my traffic and actively disrupt my connection if they detect any torrenting at all, regardless of what I am torrenting (over the phone they admitted to this and said it's to "comply with copyright laws").

I would love to campaign for a municipal internet service, but my state has laws against it thanks to major ISP lobbying. Are there truly no other options except to move to an area with better service? What's a consumer to do?

5 comments

[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 23.4 ms ] thread
doctorshady
I'm stuck in the same boat; I'm on satellite. In fairness to the ISP, they do a decent job. They advertise 12 mbps, and typically deliver 20 or so, but there's still a 10 GB cap. As some consolation for this though, 12 AM - 5 AM are unmetered. A couple of cron scripts makes life a lot more livable.

I end up using dial-up for low latency stuff like SSH. Thankfully, there's someone in my area who offers it for free.

You may want to try a non-Uverse DSL option from AT&T. Definitely make sure, but I've heard people say they throttle those less for some reason.

cjbprime
Does your area have anything like 4G LTE? I wonder if cellphone tethering would actually give you better performance.
hashtag
Not comparable and the bandwidth cost would be insane.
mbrownnyc
I've always wondered what level of service a building owner could deliver if they bought a 100Mbps circuit from a tier 1 or tier 2 provider and split it through a building. What about splitting it through a block? Come to think of it, wouldn't that make them an ISP? You could even see a rise in private firms managing CPEs. So maybe this would be your best bet: either get a dedicated circuit into a PoP and pay for a cross-connect, or just subscribe to a lower bandwidth tier 1 line. This obviously depends on the availability of media in your area.
joeclark77
My parents live in a rural area without cable. Tried satellite for a while, then just got a smartphone and used it as a hotspot. The performance was much better.

I live in a major city but am thinking of doing the same. T-Mobile charges me $10 a month for the minimum data plan, with the unlimited data plan being only $30. So as I see it, that means it'd only be a marginal cost of $20 for an internet connection. I've used it before and the speed is fine. I don't know if it'd be good enough for downloading HD video from Netflix, or for playing twitch-based online games, but it's fine for surfing the web or downloading documents.