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
this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
278 points (99.3% liked)
News
25448 readers
6554 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
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.
A competitive market requires double digits of companies at the least. And that's with serious enforcement of anti-collusion laws. Internet can't ever be that because it's infrastructure. It needs to be a government agency.
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.
we have sonic, we left Xfinity of thier outrageous tiered pricing BS with bundling.
cries in $60 for 50/20 D:
australia.
I really wish Australia had rolled out the proper NBN instead of the worse, cheaper initially but more expensive over the long run version. I'm Aussie but I live in the USA now. I've heard that even gigabit NBN plans aren't symmetric? Crazy for a network that's supposed to be "modern".
I had ADSL2+ "up to 24Mbps" in Australia back in 2013. In reality it synced at around 7Mbps. I moved to the USA at the end of the year and my apartment had a 600Mbps connection. It was... an experience. So many sites were hosted in the USA at that time too (much cheaper servers and bandwidth than Australia) so latency was much lower in the USA too.
Yup. No symmetric gigabit plans here. But you have to have fttp to get gigabit. Which, thanks to the Liberal government, hardly anyone has.
What's crazy to me is that some of the big internet companies in the USA are rolling out symmetric 2Gbps over cable using DOCSIS 4.0, by upgrading their equipment. In theory that should be possible over the Optus and Telstra HFC networks in Australia too, yet I haven't heard of any attempts to do this.
Bruh, I get 50 Mbps for less than 10 USD.
You can only squeeze every penny out of your population for so long before the majority don't have any pennies left... With more and more people in the US living paycheck to paycheck and the increase of credit card debt on the raise... We are nearing that point... Trump will probably send this country into the biggest recession in history but it will be ok because they won't call it one like the last time he was president...
Not just the EU, but Europe in general really
While living in Spain I had access to better and cheaper internet through my mobile phone.
Now I'm back I'm Canada and I could cry. Rogers asks 40$ for 15GB of slow as ass interwebs.
Part of our problem is sprawl...but in a metro there's no excuse.
We know and we are furious
When ISPs cry foul over fair pricing, states remind them who holds the broadband reins.
😺😺😺😺
Strike down a federal mandate, get 52 mandates to worry about
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.
But what about the shareholders whose profit might be slightly constrained?
/s
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.
Well now I'm going to call spectrum to downgrade currently paying $30 for 400mbit.. I only really steam so that is kind of overkill
Probably only in certain states. I don't see most red states implementing something like this.
You mean the great American porn belt?
Good?