The internet in the US is a massive joke. They clearly have the money to build up a more robust, actually worth the money infrastructure but they rather not and overcharge people for """high speed""" internet instead.

In the US, all of the companies which do bundling make most of their money from internet service and ppv (porn/some sports). That's why they try to sound like good guys saying "we don't throttle xyz." The net service already makes way more money than their tv.

Comcast's 1TB limit means with 100Mbps you can only use it for 3% full-pipe saturation uptime of the month. 250Mbps is 1%.

Most of the competition has been made illegal or sued over technicalities. There's a lot of corruption to have this level of control. But for them that means no incentives to do better. They're becoming like the DMV.

I'm in Alabama as well.

My choices where I currently live are:
WOW! - no caps
Mediacom (current provider) - $35 a month for 200Mb down - supposed 2TB cap
AT&T - The fastest I can get from them is 15Mb down with a no clue what they provide in terms of upload speed, and yet it is supposedly fiber. 🤣

AT&T is a joke. way higher prices for way lower speed.

I change between Mediacom and WOW! every time my "new customer" deal expires.

We are also supposed to be getting Google Fiber in my area pretty soon, so I will probably end up switching to that whenever it becomes available.

The problem with the single ISP available in a lot of areas is:
1. If you live in a housing development, the ISP that bids the lowest gets an exclusivity deal to be the only ISP in that development
2. When you have multiple ISPs available, a lot of the time they give really similar pricing and then tell you that they don't compete with each other. The last time I moved, I got a piece of paper mail from my old provider recommending one of the other providers because my old provider was not available in that area..... yeah, no price fixing going on there...
3. Existing providers do everything in their power to keep other providers from coming in. They keep stuff tied up in regards to permits for as long as possible and hope that new providers that want to come in just give up.

You also have to take into account how spread out things are in the US. If it isn't economically feasible for ISPs to run connections to a few people out in the boonies or to areas with lower population in general, they are not going to do it. they are in business to make money, not to spend their money on things that will never make a return on their investment.

cyclone3d wrote:

I'm in Alabama as well. […]
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I'm in Alabama as well.

My choices where I currently live are:
WOW! - no caps
Mediacom (current provider) - $35 a month for 200Mb down - supposed 2TB cap
AT&T - The fastest I can get from them is 15Mb down with a no clue what they provide in terms of upload speed, and yet it is supposedly fiber. 🤣

AT&T is a joke. way higher prices for way lower speed.

I change between Mediacom and WOW! every time my "new customer" deal expires.

We are also supposed to be getting Google Fiber in my area pretty soon, so I will probably end up switching to that whenever it becomes available.

The problem with the single ISP available in a lot of areas is:
1. If you live in a housing development, the ISP that bids the lowest gets an exclusivity deal to be the only ISP in that development
2. When you have multiple ISPs available, a lot of the time they give really similar pricing and then tell you that they don't compete with each other. The last time I moved, I got a piece of paper mail from my old provider recommending one of the other providers because my old provider was not available in that area..... yeah, no price fixing going on there...
3. Existing providers do everything in their power to keep other providers from coming in. They keep stuff tied up in regards to permits for as long as possible and hope that new providers that want to come in just give up.

You also have to take into account how spread out things are in the US. If it isn't economically feasible for ISPs to run connections to a few people out in the boonies or to areas with lower population in general, they are not going to do it. they are in business to make money, not to spend their money on things that will never make a return on their investment.

Yeah if Google fiber is coming anywhere in Bama it will be Huntsville.....certainly not in beautiful downtown Danville!

I live in a rural area n California. Our cable internet download speed caps out at 200KB/sec. I suppose ISPs probably rate their throughput in raw terms (10 bits per byte), so I guess this is 2Mbps.
I don't mind this as long as it works. The problem I have is that during peak hours the throughput becomes abysmally slow. The service is also unreliable. It's been prone to outages, and when this happens, it seems like it never gets fixed until normal business hours. To be fair though, it's been better in the last few months.
The local/regional dialup ISPs I had past exerience with were bulletproof. Cable has never been as good as they were.
When I see ads on TV advertising 100Mbps or 1Gbps internet to the spoiled city folks, speeds that I use on my LAN, and making it sound like lesser services are oh so terrible, and they really *need* more speed, I have to laugh. What are these people doing with their internet that they need such an absurd amount of speed? Different worlds. All I want from my internet is ONE Mbps that I can rely on 24/7/365.25.

The phone company has a competing DSL service, but I don't think it actually reaches our address.
Satellite is an option, but I've been resistant to that due to the inherent latency.

So my real complaint is reliability. I would be interested in signing up for some kind of "on demand" cell based service. I would like it to be structured such that I can economically use it as an emergency backup. I'd like to be able to pay basically nothing at all for it except when I use it. When the occasional emergency arises, I'll be willing to pay a premium rate per GB. But I haven't found any such service being offered. The only way to get service from a cell company is if I commit to a significant monthly expense for something I won't normally need.
As far as making the cell service my primary ISP, I don't think that's competitive on price.

The Internet at my house is a joke and a half sometimes. When it's nighttime, the Internet goes too slow, and my router resets itself every Sunday night at 3AM EST.