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It would be interesting to see these three data points along with broadband price.
- Per capita income/GDP of the country. This should highly influence the cost of laying new lines and manpower costs. From the map it looks like broadband is cheaper in lower income countries mostly.
- Normalized for speed. It seems pointless to compare connections otherwise. I checked the 1 Gbps fibre plans in India as that is shown cheaper. It seems like the cost of 1 Gbps plans there as well is around $60-80, some of them seem to have FUP as well.
- What qualifies as "broadband" is consistent throughout.
> Both Greenland and Bermuda can blame their expensive packages on geography and uptake, but what about the United States? At $50.00 on average and coming in in 119th place worldwide, one would expect American packages to be considerably cheaper. But while broadband in the United States is widely available and uptake is high, lack of competition in the marketplace means Americans pay far more than they should compared to much of the rest of the world.
Does the HN community agree with the assessment that the lack of competition is why the prices are high? If so, does anybody have some explanations/links for why there is a lack of competition and some proposals to improve the problem? I know community broadband projects are starting to popup, I'm guessing partially due to this issue.
Also, is there a tradeoff? Is the "widely available and uptake is high" benefit in part because of the low competition?
Part of it is the odd way Americans respond to try to increase competition.
Essentially, entrenched players are given the pens to write their own rules under a banner that reads "deregulation" effectively locking themselves in more.
Then people blame "the government" for this problem and hand the pens over to the companies again to write even more rules that favor themselves.
Pointing out this brazenly obvious pattern is shouted down as socialist or leftist, which makes it a Forbidden Thought in America so it continues unabated out in the open. It's pretty remarkable.
The majority of people in the US live in a place with only one useful broadband option, which is usually the cable provider along with DSL which I do not consider broadband.
If you recall the drama of Google Fiber and other relatively recent attempts to rollout fiber, the existing companies have often gotten local and state laws passed making it extremely difficult to add competitive services at a more reasonable cost.
Well managed DSL isn't terrible. I've got bonded VDSL2 at a combined 80 Mbps/10 Mbps. That's good enough for most things, although it's tier limited (my lines could do more, but the sync rate is capped), and I'd love more upstream, and a bunch of other stuff... But it's not bad enough for me to foot the bill to get muni fiber extended to my house (and then tear up my driveway to get it to the house).
From what I understand this isn’t what’s available to most. Anecdotally the DSL I’ve found available as an alternate at a few places in the country has been less than 30 Mbps at best.
Might make sense if you view it as a capital improvement. I wouldn’t consider buying a house without fiber, or if I had the option, I would value a house with fiber much more.
Lack of competition is a big factor in US pricing, although cost of labor, and regulatory burdens probably raises the floor price.
Competiton is rare because of several factors. The most important one being overbuilding a new network on an area with existing wiring is expensive, time consuming, and unlikely to result in enough customers to make a good return on investment; especially since the incumbent networks are likely to respond by upgrading their network, usually faster than the overbuild. For a historical example, look at Google's fiber build out announcement for 10 or so cities, followed by AT&Ts announcement for most of the same cities, and then Google's retraction after AT&T actually built the network, and Google hadn't even got planning approval for their Fiber boxes.
The solution is local loop unbundling, as congress provided in the telecom act of 1996, and the FCC dismantled over the ensuing decade. Ideally, more fully realised as in other countries, where the local loop provider(s) are never the service providers. It doesn't make sense to run a large number of networks to the same houses in the same city; instead, that part should be leasable, with providers servicing the connections from central locations.
this supply-side analysis is relevent and well-spoken, yet one wonders what has been done with the already-in-place guranteed income from managed-monopoly markets around the US for the last 25 years ?
It’s all about competition — these services have 60-90% margins depending on the capital expenses needed in a region.
The costs of all of the service delivery components drop over time — automation eliminated many of the expensive positions and the costs of switching and other gear has been in free fall for years.
My brother in law lives about 1000 yards from my house, in a suburban town. I’m in the city. My spectrum internet is $70 for 75 down, he pays $32 for 150. Spectrum is not losing money.
The difference? The town has FIOS. Verizon isn’t moving into the city because the margins on future 5G connectivity is much higher than FIOS.
It's pretty much directly a result of the traditional regulatory/structural preferences of the US. Works well for some things, but not so great for telcom/infrastructure.
There is no competition; let's exclude the probably sub-10% of the US where you are in a major city, live in a MDU, and can get genuine fiber (at least 1G/1G, last mile metro-e/eth/fiber, for the purposes of this), or live in an area that has at least one fiber provider.
Your choices are: cable (either Comcast or Spectrum, pretty much everyone else has been acquired into one of these), ADSL1 (3 Mbps or less), LTE ($10-15/GB used, no carrier actually has an unlimited plan and they will terminate you for using a phone plan SIM in your hotspot, all heavily DPI and modify your traffic). In rare areas, AT&T or similar offer "home internet" (250GB cap $60/m on contract) over LTE.
Comcast, Spectrum, et al have long since advertised fiber (they do coax/cable). They brag about their fast fiber network in an attempt to mislead people in the US that don't know better. Last mile is cable, and upstream is generally sub-10Mbps + because the last mile is cable, your latency for things such as video games are significantly worse (15ms vs <1ms to something in the same city).
In fact, Comcast does not even list upload speeds on their site anymore the last time I checked. No matter how hard you drill down, click Details, read the fine print, etc. This is incredibly good for "shut up and consume media" and incredibly bad for "learn, upload, create". On top of that, they repeatedly use the word gigabit for plans offering sub-ADSL upload speeds. They do not mention upload. It appears that currently the highest tier plans on Comcast offer up to 35 Mbps upload based on HN comments and DSLReports forum posts.
Comcast and their cable friends also repeatedly attempt to use their billions to sue small towns into the ground when they try to start a community broadband project[0][1][2][..etc]. Trying to start muni fiber is a great way to drown in lawsuits from every incumbent provider that _does not even serve your area or have plans to serve your area_, they just want to set a precedent. Like they literally do not care for your city at all and do not plan to ever offer service there because it's a waste of money to them, but they will happily spend many millions trying to kill this.
Contracts are usually mandatory, signed for several years, along with other anticompetitive things like requiring the use of their remotely-administered equipment that you are locked out of, or charging you large fees to use your own. For example, ludicrously low bandwidth caps on Comcast, where they charge you the cost of an unmetered gigabit plan in most countries just to remove the cap. But you can get a discount if you use their remotely-controlled hardware that also requires you to sign in to your account to view your wifi password and runs a public hotspot off it.
[EDIT BASED ON COMMENT REPLIES: OK, contracts are no longer mandatory these days, but in reality you are going to pay at minimum 1.5x to 2x the cost per month without the contract discount, at least on Comcast. For the vast majority of the US, they will often take this, eat the hard credit inquiry hit to save on the money, though.]
There are a few incumbent-esque fiber providers like Frontier that offer bizarre speed choices and mandatory contracts (2 years is often the case), which cap out at something like 200 Mbps for "FTTH" which is odd, and has useful support roughly equivalent to Comcast on a good day. These providers also have spent money lobbying on the above instead of, I don't know, updating their networks.
Generally in any location in the US (with exceptions like in SF, Seattle, Oakland, etc. where you are lucky enough to live in a MDU with multiple fiber providers or a municipal broadband area), you do not actually have a free choice of provider, it's either cable or ADSL1. Almost no provider of DSL does VDSL or ADSL2+ or similar; if you are in an area that demands DSL it's likely you are sitting at 3-6Mbps down and sub-1Mbps up. Almost no provider will bond multiple DSL lines.
In most other countries, DSL is generally significantly more tolerable to use (and I love the fritzbox compared to the abomination of ISP-provided hardware I've seen in the US), which is probably one of the reasons why people think the US has choices when it comes to DSL. They have VDSL2 - the US has ADSL1 that caps at 3 Mbps on a good day and goes out when it rains; DSL is the "I have no other options" choice, not the first choice. For example, in Germany, 1&1's $25 DSL plan actually beats Comcast 'gigabit' on upload.
[0] https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadbloc... (potentially biased source; affiliate advertising for home internet)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-comcas...
[2] https://muninetworks.org/content/mediacom-lawyers-slow-compe...
>Generally in any location in the US (with exceptions like in SF, Seattle, Oakland, etc. where you are lucky enough to live in a MDU with multiple fiber providers or a municipal broadband area),
I've never seen a residence in the US with multiple fiber ISP options. And when purchasing a house in the past year, I noticed fiber was available if the entire subdivision was newly built in the past 5, maybe 10 years, otherwise fiber is unavailable. So the telecom companies are laying fiber, but only if the entire area is new and they're laying new everything. If you build a new house in an area with existing homes, you won't get new fiber. And I didn't find any pre-2010 houses with fiber period.
In the bay area there's some overlap. I've seen places that have Webpass in addition to something else, but it's always a MDU and not a single family home. I'll edit it a bit to clarify.
From what I've seen fiber providers are split into these:
- $$$$$, business, anywhere, pay per mile to pull fiber
- old-ish home incumbents like Frontier, often strange plans like 100 Mbps and 200 Mbps or 250 Mbps - I have no idea what their equipment looks like to provide this
- planned neighborhood telcos like https://smartcitytelecom.com/residential/
- municipal fiber, local utility co (EPBCo, Longmont)
- MDU-only urban fiber (Google Fiber Webpass)
Ting brought fiber into our 40 year-old neighborhood a couple of years ago. Symmetric gigabit with no caps.
I’m in a neighborhood developed between 60 and 75 years ago. We have fiber.
Sonic Fiber is in many places in SF. I have it. Best ISP ever.
Exactly. They don't lay copper anymore, just fiber and then use an ONT to break it up into Phone, Data, Security, and Video.
I don't disagree with your sentiment but you have some factual errors that others will use to invalidate your argument.
Contracts aren't required and for a long time there was backlash against them so they weren't pushed hard.
Upload speeds aren't that bad, they're usually around 1/4 of download speeds. I had 125mbps Comcast for years and the upload speed was around 30mbps.
In every market I have live in, the US broadband market generally has 2 providers. One offers a cheap bottom tier and then higher tier ridiculous plans no one would buy. The other provider is the opposite, offering a comparably worse low tier plan but better higher tier.
There's no competition, rather a gentleman's agreement that one provider would own the low tier and another the high to give the impression that there isn't a monopoly.
Who is the high or low tier provider varies by market but there's never any real competition.
No contracts here for years. Have choice between super reliable and low latency cable and super reliable and low latency fiber. Fiber has 5X higher speeds for given spend, but either way is objectively sufficient for household needs. Neither have monthly limits. 5G is being deployed and will someday be a third option.
One factor that doesn’t seem to be considered is cost of labor. American technical labors aren’t cheap.
It also isn't cheap in most comparable countries. I think that a quick look at the interactive map show some correlation between labor cost & broadband price (that's probably why Norway stands out, for example), but it's also obvious that it doesn't dictate the price .
Would be nice if there was an axis on there for broadband speed. I pay $70/month for 1Gbps synchronous (Google Fiber); if you could get that for $20/month in another country that would be a fitting comparison but since "broadband" isn't defined the list is not as meaningful.
Yeah, Ireland is listed as more expensive on average than the UK or Canada, for example, but everything I've heard about the quality of internet services in Canada or the UK leads me to feel that at least outside more rural areas, we get a better quality of service here.
For example, I can go to Bell Canada, and spot they have the following prices (prices converted to USD from CAD):
* $23 for 10mbit/s with 100GB cap
* $40 for 50mbit/s
* $75 for 100mbit/s
* $90 for 1 gbit/s
Also I spot checked a couple of suburbs in quebec city (because everything I'd heard indicated the above was suspicious) to see what the internet availability was like, and the ones I checked all only offered DSL at:
* $55 for 5mbit/s with no cap
* $46 for 5mbit/s with 50GB cap
We're not talking the sticks or some frozen house up super far north here, we're talking suburbs of a decently sized city.
Compared to my own ISP, Virgin Media Ireland (prices are post 6 month-introductory prices converted from EUR to USD):
* $70 for 250mbit/s
* $85 for 500mbit/s
* $100 for 1gbit/s
They are available in most of the area of our cities and most medium sized towns also.
I also checked with eir, who are effectively the ISP of last resort for my parents home where you get DSL also, and they offer:
* $35 for 40mbit/s
My understanding is this is VDSL2, but not fibre to the cabinet at their particular exchange. The pricing tier is for 100mbit/s but eir are at least upfront with the fact you won't get this at their address.
This is a village of a few hundred people that's not along a major infrastructure route between cities or large towns. However, reliability and contention would likely be as bad as the Canadian option from when I lived there.
We're not the netherlands here or some of the other central European countries with gigabit for €20/month in Ireland, but I'd still take it over Canadian internet, while the chart implies it to be worse.
For what it's worth the actual prices in Canada can vary hugely from the advertised price.
A family member recently set up symmetric 150 unlimited for $50 USD equivalent (or maybe $55, forget if that was with or without tax). 1Gb would have been 65-70 ish.
The way they do this on a 2 year contract is to sign you up for the advertised price, then give you a bunch of different credits (in this case, about $250-$300) to bring it back down. I guess there is a risk you forget to renegotiate at the end of term, but it seems to work over and over.
And also data caps - I pay £53 a month for 380 down 35 up unlimited (and I've pulled down 3-4TB a month for over a year with nary a nastygram from my ISP), but other places you'll not only pay more, but there will be overage fees if you exceed an arbitrary limit.
I pay like 40$/month for 1Gbps synchronos fiber (Kazoom) here in Denmark, no caps and BYOD.
Fwiw that’s almost exactly my cost too (Stockholm, Sweden). 599Sek=$70 and change. 25% of it is VAT. Its
Sonic in Silicon Valley: $50 / 1 Gbps connection. No hidden fees.
Isn’t it actually $60-65, because they won’t sell you the service without a $10-15/month voice line that I, at least, will never plug an actual phone into?
I mean, I’m mostly just annoyed by the dishonesty in the marketing, Sonic service has been awesome, and $65 is still a great deal for truly symmetric 1 Gbps.
I just checked their availability site and it said at my address (in Sunnyvale, arguably silicon valley, but maybe not) was $49.99/mo for 24mbps.
I tried a second time specifically selecting the 1Gbps fiber option from their top bar and it gave the same result.
In their Excel data they have a column for cost per megabit.
It says $2.31 month for Mbps in Japan average but I don't think it's real. ($231 monthly for 100Mbps? WTF?)
FTTH is most popular fixed-line broadband and 1Gbps is common. 100Mbps option is available but not much sold unless apartment don't support fibre but support VDSL. I believe CATVs offers at least 100Mbps. How they calculated?
Definitely needs a breakdown by speed, e.g. what's the average cost to get 1-10 / 10-100 / 100-1000 Mbit, etc else this is all meaningless apples to oranges comparison.
I lived in Switzerland and there ~ $50 a month (with some deal shopping) gets you 1 Gbit almost anywhere, at least near cities. People hate UPC for business tactics but their network is good and available everywhere.
Now in UK I have to put up with shitty 15 Mbit so called broadband and no sane amount of money can get me anything higher on a cable in my block. 1Gbit fiber is a feature for luxury housing. I'm paying for two extra unlimited data 4G SIMs (at least 4G network is kind of reasonable) and a VPS and spent weekends polishing my MPTCP VPN setup for get something resembling 100 Mbit broadband, but way more unstable and expensive.
Kind of useless without taking into account the different types of "broadband". Even in a small country such as the Netherlands there's wild price variations for fast internet if it's available (at some places synchronous gigabit is offered for €34/mo while at others offer it's €90/mo).
The map also doesn't take into account the subdivision of countries, even huge ones like the US and Russia. You can't compare Siberian or Alaskan internet prices, or Silicon Valley prices for that matter, to prices in densely populated areas. In African cities internet availability is a pain, but it's infinitely better than internet availability in remote villages.
The map makes for nice colours but there's no conclusion to be made from it. You need to process the data itself and combine it with other sources (like the average internet speeds reported by speedtest.net and several wealth indices) to get any use out of it.
Yeah speed and other metrics are important. It would be silly to compare people across countries when you have internal disparities such as in NZ residential pay NZ$250(€150/USD$170) for 4gig symmetrical or pay NZ$70 (€40/USD$50) 100meg symmetrical. If it made sense for a lot of people in the country to buy the 4 gig plan then it's price would skyrocket as it's actually being used rather than just being sold to use slack infrastructure.
There was an article yesterday comparing broadband speeds in the US and Europe: https://fairinternetreport.com/research/usa-vs-europe-intern...
Didn’t look at the details but how did they arrive at the conclusion that Stockholm’s broadband dropped to 1/3rd the speed from 2018 to 2019, then shot back up in 2020?
Did they test one connection on one day and that place had some technical difficulty? Seems unlikely that the broadband in a big city with dozens of service providers could vary by that much year on year.
"CIS" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_of_Independent_St...) does not equal "Former USSR". Ukraine is not (and has neven been) a member of CIS. If you want to say "former USSR", just say "former USSR". Don't try to use "CIS" as a kind of a euphemism for "former USSR", this is simply a different thing with a different meaning.
Sorry for the rant, but I think someone will find it useful.
Looks like some people use the CIS to mean the ex-USSR sans Baltic states. But even then it is not correct.
For all practical purposes the CIS is completely useless and the term itself fell out of circulation by now (even in the member countries).
Does it make sense to compare residential internet here? You might be paying for 1Gbps, but you're not guaranteed to actually get it. At a congested time your speeds might be much lower.
Business internet connections usually are guaranteed. They also cost several times more though.
If you work from home, then could your ISP tell you to get a business connection if you use too much bandwidth?
It's an odd colour scale on that map, red, then light blue through black. Usually it's something simpler, like blue through red.
It takes a look at the scale to realize that the former Soviet Union countries actually have the best price rather than the worst price.
Might be good to have a 2nd map adjusted for PPP as well.
This is generally pointless if you use arbitrary country boundaries. Geography maters for fixed-line services. More importantly availability compared to geographic area ie acres.
I am not sure what "narrative" this is selling but it is pointless if you do not take into account line feet.
I don't think the Canadian price is at all reflective of average broadband prices
Averaging over regions in the US would be like averaging an entire continent.
I haven't paid under $100/mo for _decent speed_ broadband for almost 10 years.
Canada must have cheated. How did they jump -$22 in one year? I didn’t notice these discounts.
Would be interesting to see price\Mbps
Aren't there only 196 countries?