I’m an unfortunate captive of the oligopoly of the internet industry in the USA. In many places, you have 2-3 choices of internet, and all of them suck ass. I’m in this situation. All internet providers in my area have a 1-1.5 terabyte data cap. So when I download Call of Duty for 250 gb and it fails and has to update or reinstall, I’ve wasted 500 gb, and have now reached 50% of my data cap in just 1 day. There are crazy fees, for example, Cox Cable says:
If you go over, we’ll automatically add 50 gigabytes of data for $10 to your next bill. That’s enough for about 15 hours of streaming HD video. If you use that 50 gigabytes, we automatically add another 50 gigabytes for $10 and so on until you reach our $100 limit of data overage charges or until your next usage cycle begins.
So your $90 a month internet can easily become $190 a month, which is fuckin criminal, like that is so scummy and asinine how that can even be legal. But it is perfectly legal. The FCC is also looking into these data caps but now that we have a new anti-federal government president elect… This is probably toast… Nothing will change now that most federal agencies are about to be deleted.
From a technology standpoint too, nothing is really getting better
Comcast is still using Coax instead of Fiber Optic and desperately trying to convince people that somehow, someway coax can be just as good. Do with that info what you will, I have no opinions on it. There was a Federal program started recently to expand rural internet access, which will probably be gutted in 2025 leaving many without suitable internet again. Fiber Optic is fast, but still, not new technology, and doesn’t solve a critical issue… It doesn’t matter if you have 2 Gigabit internet if no one in the world is uploading even half that fast. A single download on Steam is like 450 Mbps, Epic Games launcher is horrifically slow. I get like 120 Mbps max when downloading Fortnite updates even with 1500 Mbps internet hard wired to my router with top tier hardware
It’s just sad to think about the future of internet in the USA, and knowing we’ll be imprisoned by these data caps for the foreseeable future.
Data caps are insane in 2024
1.5Tb data cap, jeez. I regularly push 6tb of monthly traffic by myself. This feels like mobile internet all over again, but now with wired…
They probably kill off any agency who would protect your consumer rights, anyway. And redefine “broadband” as “you’ve got modem access, so stop whining”. And let the companies keep the subsidies they got for making the former broadband definition happen.
Based on Ajit Pai last time, there will be a significant rollback on consumer rights and protections. You can bet Starlink will get greenlit for anything they want though.
Things are getting better. A new fiber-only network provider is expanding across my region so I got it installed a few months ago. No data caps, 500 Mbps up+down for $50/month.
Speaking of fiber and things that are not fiber, asymmetric connections are one of the most predatory internet practices in existence, only a small distance behind data caps. Oh, you want our super expensive 1gbps plan? How about 3mbps upload?
There used to be very real hardware reasons that upload had much lower bandwidth. I have no idea if there still are.
Probably because they don’t need to as we are used to it and also more bandwidth to multiplex for other residens/clients to offer.
“I get like 120 Mbps max” Literally 5-10x faster than most internet in the UK, no datacaps here though.
are you sure youre not confusing Mbps and MB/s
Nah the UK uses megabits too, because inflating your percieved speeds eightfold is good marketing everywhere.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/constituency-data-broadband-coverage-and-speeds/
out of 650 uk constituancies, 167 have lower average speeds than 120 mbps. the lowest is 48.1
I have literally never seen internet above 40 mbps, even in the middle of Glasgow. Is this based on actual useable internet speeds or just the connection speed to the nearest relay down the street?
no idea, comes from ofcom but i gave up looking
Lol we have 50 mbps/6MBs down right now with DSL.
In theory we could go higher but the allocation is already exhausted for the provider and we don’t feel like changing.
At this point, I wonder why people aren’t simply laying down cable between eachothers homes to create communitary networks.
Because thats not the internet, thats LAN
Make a large enough LAN and you get a small internet hub.
That’s quite the investment
How much is your average subscription over there?
Probably like $120/month. You can certainly get lower, if you want like 15Mbps.
The infrastructure cost is prohibitively expensive though. Current ISPs have rigged it so the barrier for entry is massive. And making something actually widespread will force you to get permits from local government, which the ISPs lobby.
No, no.
I literaly mean you pull a cable between yours and your neighbors house. Then the next house and so on and so forth.
Like building a record breaking lan party.
Okay so is it your immediate neighbour only because as soon as you go onto public land you need permission, duct acces and consider traffic management.
No one here trusts their neighbors like that lol. It would be awesome though
Well, the idea would be for one of them to get a business class connection, then they all split the price.
People have done this. That was a story I read maybe 6 months ago about a guy that couldn’t get FiOS at his location. They kept jerking him around on getting the business class connection then the fiber contractors kept drinking around it’s kind of hard to pull this off in a way where the companies don’t jack you around.
Unlimited full fibre here in the rural nothern Highlands of Scotland for £35 per month.
Your internet seems similar to your politicians: useless and expensive.
that’s one hell of a free burn
I normally don’t like to admit this but you’re right. OP needs to move.
In all honesty and without any sarcasm that was obviously present in my previous comment, looking in at the US as an outsider, I don’t hold out much hope for America. It’s not just Team Trump, it’s the whole system. The previous lot weren’t much better (and often sometimes worse). Everything seems extremely polarised which will never pan out well. Big corporations seem to control everything (from internet and food to finance and pharma), there’s no free health care (a human right considered by many countries but viewed as communism by America). I could go on and on, but I would only sound unnecessarily negative. A good idea would be to get out and get off an obvious sinking ship. This is probably easier said than done, but there’s always a way. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not perfect elsewhere, but I think once the US collapses it’ll be a wake-up call for a lot of countries who will also have to adjust having relied so heavily on America through trade as well as culturally. If too big to fail was a real thing, then we wouldn’t have history books full of empires collapsing. With all sincerity, good luck.
The only hope I have is that the next generation will bring more love. There is a lot of disenfranchisement due to the changes over the last 40 years. The lasting effects of coal and steel work reduction, offshoring of jobs, minority rights improving, immigration changing demographics. All of these have been very strange and alarming for a lot of people my age and older. It’s all normal to my kids though.
You’re right tho. Empires rise and fall. The whole world is fucked if we’ve hit our peak.
Don’t the numbers indicate the opposite is happening. I fear for my children because I know they are loving and caring.
OP needs to move.
Unfortunately, most counties don’t want us Americans (and I don’t blame them).
Edit: Unless you’re rich that is.
France reporting, same price and that’s because I’m using the more expensive provider that is the most reliable in my rural area.
Our politicians are completely useless though.
Yeah, but yall are actually cool and bust out the guillotines every once in a while.
Turkey (Asia Minor) reporting, it’s 1 Gbps unlimited for $25.
Hardcore capitalism bangs you hardcore for even human-right level things. Health, education and infrastructure should be the State’s responsibility, subventions doesn’t cut it.
I think you just described the US as a whole.
I pay $70 a month for google fiber and it’s legit a thing that keeps me in the city I’m in because better is absolutely fucking rare.
This isn’t me trying to flex, this is me crying because I’d rather be in Scotland.
Weather’s shit a lot of the time here in Scotland.
Recently Highland & Lothian Broadband rolled out full fibre here in the Northern Highlands - the installation of which was government funded. I’m pretty rural so I grabbed the basic package at £35 per month (about $45) and it’s more than enough for my needs. However the top package 2000Mbps (up & down) will set you back £54.99 per month (approx’ $71), although that’s an introductory offer and goes up to £89.99 (approx’ $116) after 24 months. I can’t fault the service. No caps, no limits, router is modern with WiFi 6 although I ethernet most things using my old router as a switch. I also don’t seem to be blocked from any websites. My previous provider, BT Broadband, blocked me from The Pirate Bay requiring me to use a VPN. Not so with Highland Broadband. Straight in, no problems.
Mine is the basic package for the price I’m doing, so your system is still nice.
I’ll honestly take the weather being shit. I live where there is no chance in hell government will fund a thing and that was before the current election. And the weather here is humid as fuck with either 100 degrees F to Below 0 with the humidity being the only predictable thing, maybe a week of spring and fall each. Oh, and tornadoes.
Aye, people criticise the Scottish government but they have short memories. They forget what it was like before devolution and particularly prior to SNP rule. Labour and the Tories never gave a fuck about Scotland. They still don’t. The only sadness is that we never got full independence. Whilst there is indeed a lot to criticise with the SNP there’s also much that they have given us and making sure rural communities get decent internet access is just one of those things. Hell, my broadband is better up here than it was when I lived in the central belt. The National Health Service works better up here too, and free health with free prescriptions has got to be a good thing. Down in England they still have to pay for prescriptions. Honestly, I don’t understand why 55% voted to stay in the UK back in 2014. I guess it’s like people voting Trump - there’s just a lot of fucking dummies out there.
So the US did in fact have a process where the government did give money to get broadband to the rural. But as is the nature with this country, was not a federal workforce, but was a company based one. The companies pocketed the money, got a few people hooked up, sat on their asses, then when people complained at them years later they responded they didn’t have enough money to connect people.
And good lord I’d take English National Health Service over the US “pay an insurance company to argue why they shouldn’t pay for your healthcare”
I do have a question on the independence, over here in the states the conversation was that Scotland stayed because to break from UK would be requiring a separate entry into EU with a lot less benefits because England was one of the special ones. Always figured that Scotland might make another attempt after Brexit, is there something I missed? I admit y’alls politics I don’t quite get. Probably a lot like my talking individual state politics to you guys.
And yet here I am in the USA with 8/8 Gbps fiber with no caps. Though I do pay $185 a month. I live in a Red state, and in a metro area, but not near the metro core, in unincorporated county land.
last 30 days stats to prove no caps:
What do you have for network equipment? I have 1G symmetrical unlimited, but anything faster seems to require a jump to much more expensive networking. And even then, most user equipment can’t support that
I have basically a full rack of equipment. Here’s the network side of it all. My desktop is 2 SPF+ fiber connections back to the core switch. Tons of stuff in my rack is all 10gbps or 40gbps.
Dual opnsense firewalls (top 2 slots, dual 40gbps connecting to core switches), though one is inactive until they let me buy static addresses. I run some business stuff on this. Boatloads of homelabbing and self-learning.
If you want to do full IPS/IDS, then yes you need some horsepower. But just connection with basic rules there’s plenty out there that’s not super expensive. Ubiquiti has their dream machine line which even the “cheap” $400 one can do 10gbps (2gbps with ips, or something like that. I dunno, I don’t keep tabs on them).
I didn’t stop any active connections/downloads happening on the network. I very likely had a gig of other stuff going elsewhere on the network.Their “smart-nid” is also a router… so that works too, but I don’t trust it and in my setup it’s in transparent mode.
Edit: Formatting sucked
Cool setup!
I’ve never had caps here in the US, and while my current internet is kinda slow (50/25), it’s because I deliberately chose a lower tier because we don’t actually need more. I could get gigabit (1000/500) for $75/month or 10G for $200/month, and my city is working w/ an org to build out muni fiber, which will probably cut costs a bit (and hopefully improve reliability, ours goes out like once/month for 15 min or so).
I pay $79 AUD for 250Mb download / 20Mb upload.
It doesn’t matter if you have 2 Gigabit internet if no one in the world is uploading even half that fast.
Just to point out something, yes, there may not be many services online (except torrents perhaps) that will max out your gigabit connection, but you are looking at it from the perspective of a single user. I’m in a family of four, also with a roommate in the house, and with everyone gaming and streaming and doing their thing, it can easily saturate it. We had to pay extra for no caps though or we’d be toast. They at least did offer that. Dicks.
Anyway the point of a high speed connection is to be able to do many things simultaneously, not really one giant thing by itself.
there may not be many services online (except torrents perhaps)
Hmm… arr, matey
Yo ho ho.
This is the USA, it’s all a pay-as-you-go country. You will be required to work yourself to death to be able to have anything nice at all. That’s the model. Corporations make the rules, the government will not help us. Economy, corporate profits and giving money to the wealthy are the priorities. Nothing else matters.
Some places have banned data caps, I live in one such place… And I think the FCC was looking for feedback on the hate of data caps… If you want change go out and make it
the FCC was looking for feedback on the hate of data caps
A Republican lead FCC (Ajit Pai or some other smug fuck) will never mobilize the FCC to curb unfair and unreasonable data caps.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t currently looking into it
FCC will now be led by Repubs, who like data caps, more mergers, not treating the Internet as a utility, blocking municipal networks, and ignore listening to public comment, and flood the zone with fake comments on issues that are popular.
The biggest expansion in fiber networks in the US was coming down the pipeline due to Biden’s infrastructure bills. The Republicans will do everything they can to slow and stop this money from its intended purpose.
Any hope of huge improvements in America’s internet infrastructure just went away with the Dem administration in order to improve ISP stock prices, meaning the Internet you are currently unhappy with will only get more expensive with less competition.
As intended, by how Americans voted.
Should be grateful for that and not something like Russia, with that level of political idiocy.
No, once the FTC is gutted, the isps will resume their stronghold. Data caps, overages, slower speeds, etc.
Also get ready of net neutrality disappearing, and you’ll have sites blocked just because of ISPs not liking them.
Good time to invest in VPN companies
All of our FTC investigations and antitrust suits will disappear.
Yeah, pretty much. The way the rest of the world deals with it is by splitting the infrastructure maintenance and retail sides to eliminate the profit incentive to not do maintenance.
You have a company who owns a/the fibre network in an area and is obligated by anti-monopoly rules to sell access to the network at the same rate and terms to anyone who wants it. They have a profit incentive to maintain the network to a reasonable standard because having a functioning network is how they make money. In a lot of places this wholesale provider will be at least part government owned given that the government usually pays a good chunk of the cost to build out large national infrastructure projects like fibre networks.
Separately, you have retail ISPs who buy access to the fibre network (or 4g, satellite, …) and sell it to the public along with value adds like tech support, IP addresses, peering agreement etc.
It’s never work in the US because holding private companies accountable for how they spend public money and maintaining well regulated competitive markets is communism or something.
It’s never work in the US because holding private companies accountable for how they spend public money and maintaining well regulated competitive markets is communism or something
It did work in the US for many years. During the 90’s the Internet was regulated like that. Phone lines, t1’s etc were infrastructure that the ilec was required to provide at the same cost to isps they used internally to sell service to consumers.
Then Bush came in and ruled that fiber and cable were immune from those common carrier laws.
Internet in NZ used to work a bit like the US does now with one large ISP that is also the network operator and gave exactly zero shits about quality of connections or internationally competitive pricing, except they got greedy and charged their retail arm half what they charged their competitors. Anti-monopoly folks got very pissy about this and managed to get the largest fine permitted by law, forced them to split their wholesale arm off into a separate company, banned them from tendering on the government-funded fibre network (which cost them literally billions of dollars) and then changed the law so that if they did it again there wouldn’t be a cap on the penalty they could impose.
In 20 years we went from ~35th of the 38 OECD countries in internet speed and accessibility to 9th. Markets only work long-term if you actually regulate them
This is exactly how my local municipal fiber network works. The the county owns, and builds put, the fiber network and maintains it, selling network access to local ISPs who sell to customers.
Only shitty part is that if you want to have a connection built out that isn’t on their plan, you have to fund the fiber run to you from wherever the nearest spot is, and that can be many thousands of dollars.
I imagine if we expanded the program like you’re talking about in the rest of the world, we could actually run it fine, like, we have the ability to… It’s just that the people in power are fucking awful.
Well, maybe now with a republican FCC
lol, no
No. And I’m sorry to say, this administration is coming for social media as well. I hate watching the orange potato talk, and I dislike the individual who posted this, but unless you want to sit through a double long “reaction” vid by a youtuber who makes their living “reacting”, this is the shortest one.
He wants to gut moderation and make it so it requires a court order to remove any account from social media. There’s a lot to unpack here. It’s a scripted speech, illustrating the thinkers behind his administration this go. It talks about 1A, says everything in the speech is for 1A, including dumping the Hatch Act (keeps us safe at polling sites and makes buying votes illegal), but you should really listen to what he says about moderation of social media.
To me, it reads as a way of removing any anti-establishment, anti-MAGA spaces to talk without actually removing the spaces.
Echo chambering helps no one folks, I hate hearing him speak too, but you need to hear this one. https://youtu.be/xJfUXVOoFBo
Not only aren’t we going to get better internet, the internet in the united states you’re using right now, is going to be unrecognizable in the next 12 months, all free services will charge, cost for access will increase, vpn usage will be curtailed, and pirate sites will be blocked. Better? We just re-elected a fascist tyrant who wants to close as many avenues of free speech against him as he possibly can, as well as funnel as much cash to media and tech oligarchs as he can to keep them onside, and now he’s got both the house and senate with which to do just that.
Better? dude.
VPNs and piracy aren’t going anywhere. Unfortunately, data caps won’t be going away either.
VPNs and piracy aren’t going anywhere.
That’s not true at all.
They’ll both be going on my next PC!
It’s totally possible! I live in CO and Comcast had a legal monopoly per state law. Nobody else is allowed to compete with their cable service. But you know what isn’t cable? Fiber! A local broadband company just installed fiber in my neighborhood this spring. I signed up for $89/mo gigabit service, no data cap, no installation fees at all. Between when I signed up and when they turned on service, they upgraded my service to 1.2 gigabit, same monthly price, no cap, no commitment, no upsell (their only other service is rural satellite Internet).
I talked to the technician installing it and he said they aren’t getting any subsidies from anyone. Not the city, state, or fed. It’s simply economically viable to run new gigabit fiber for $89/mo. All it takes is a company that can make the initial infrastructure investment.
