In metro Atlanta, just outside of city limits, I was desperate for fiber for a long time. Forced to watch other neighboring cities get Google Fiber at great monthly rates. I pay a bit more with AT&T now, but it’s so worth every penny between streaming, gaming, and personal projects.
Do you really notice it with streaming? I have 80Mbps cable, and nothing has ever slowed down.
If I download something over a couple of gigs I just get a glass of water and it’s done.
Do you have a data cap? The cable provider near me charges you $10 for every 50GB over 1.25TB monthly. A while ago they offered an "unlimited" plan without that cap at a higher monthly rate.
I've never heard of a fiber connection with a data cap like that. I ended up moving to fiber eventually, it was cheaper for the same speed and the upload speed matched the download speed as well.
Not the person you are asking, but definitely yes. Bandwidth isn't the only metric at play here.
Bufferbloat was horrendous with Comcast so latency varied wildly depending on what was happening on the network. The only way around it was to cap download and upload to 80%, and that's a large dent on the already anemic upload. And I had to cap client upload too, otherwise one client could easily saturate upload and now not even TCP ACK packets were being reliably sent.
The main problem isn't cable per se, is the asymmetric link.
EDIT: Also 1Gbps symmetric allows me to backup my NAS offsite without impacting anyone else.
I don't notice. I had 60mbit/s for a while and it was fine. That's two typical 4K streams. Now I have 1gbit/s that I never use.
What I did notice was the 1mbit/s upload speed that came with it. Uploading large files to Google Drive was impossible, not just slow but would actually time out, plus bad things happen when you saturate the uplink that way.
I think there were big issues in my area because there are only two providers so congestion would peak in the evening from 4pm - 8pm. Netflix/Youtube would playback lower resolution and we’d be stuck with loading circles if we manually set it higher. If I remember correctly, that issue became less frequent before the switch, but I haven’t had the lower resolution issues since.
I think it's pretty wild that parts of the Houston metro have a better ISP story than SF. The last home I was in had multiple competing fiber providers available. My current home is in the middle of the woods and I have a 5gbps symmetric link.
For a new build or overhead wiring, it's a trivial cost that is easily recouped.
For buried infrastructure where the coaxial cable company already sells internet, you will almost never recoup your investment to bury new fiber and run it to all the homes. You can have the superior product, but insufficient people will pay enough more than the existing coaxial cable prices.
I wonder why companies do run new fiber in the US in cities, given all this?
I got underground fiber direct to the basement of a student apartment years ago and it was basically a hundred dollars for install fees. They must have already been laying it on the street, but still. Competition?
If stuff is already being dug up for another reason, then the numbers can pencil out. But it’s pretty rare for somewhere that does not have fiber to gain access to fiber, at least on any reasonable timescale.
Sweden pushed for FttH even though all outdated cabling was already buried, no idea why just a city like SF cannot do the same.
Probably a main difference is that the Swedish infrastructure was deployed by municipalities with an open access model, so no need for 10 different ISPs to dig their own cabling.
I was considering a move to Skurup five or so years ago, checked to see if gigabit fibre was available and it turned out the whole town had a 10Gb symmetric stadsnät.
The US gov was giving away a ton of money to do this in rural areas. A company came and trenched miles of roadside ditches with new fiber, and ran FTTH for free in a pretty sparsely populated area.
As a result, many rural areas have way better internet than big cities.
The expense for one is enormous. Getting all the rights to dig and running the job is a full time job for a long period time. In many cases its not even possible and the existing firms might tie you up in court and bankrupt you long before you complete.
I don't have Fiber. I have never needed more bandwidth.
I work from home 1 or 2 days a week. My current bandwidth is more than sufficient for my personal usage. And I exclusively use Wifi, other than a TV and a Nintendo Switch that happen to be right next to the router so are plugged in. So even if I had fiber, I literally wouldn't know a difference because my wifi would be the bottleneck still.
Back when Google Fiber was rolling in, no one I knew was looking forward to it because they had need for the increased bandwidth. They looked forward to it because the expectation of a 'Google' branded product was better than the expectation of a 'Comcast' branded product. It was more about the expected uptime and consistency.
When I moved there like 10yrs ago I thought I would finally have 1gig fiber, but bandwidth was on par with what I had with my parent's VDSL connection from the country side, and latencies were worse, I went from sub-5ms to 30ms because many servers were actually in LA and the routes were bad (I expected ~1ms per 100km, not ~5ms/100km).
ISP gerrymandering to avoid competition was unexpected coming from the land of free markets
That’s because infra telecom is done incorrectly. Look at Sweden’s municipal fiber model how you make infrastructure cheaper and make competition actually work for customers. Having each carrier have to run lines to each customer is the wrong model. Sweden somehow got it done in a moment of sanity when the leading telecom pushed for this model.
I spent a lot of time in SF in the early 2010s and I couldn't believe how absolutely terrible the internet was in the heart of silicon valley. It's incredibly sad honestly. You'd expect that SF would have the worlds top internet speeds, but nope. It was quite disappointing.
FCC: high standards are unfairly prejudicial against subpar infrastructure.
> The Carr FCC said last year that the gigabit goal “may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds.”
I don't know if this is so much a handout to Starlink, seems like a way to win the race by moving the finish line.
it's a regulatory change that opens up fiber infrastructure money for other uses, so it certainly is another Starlink handout, in addition to the hundreds of millions of dollars they've already received from taxpayers
though if we want to be fair, the competition is other telecoms that were also abusing the handouts until very recently
I mean given that effectively all other ISPs delivered nothing under these programs, it's a lot better for folks living in rural areas to get Starlink than nothing...
Why lie? The Gigabit Project is a £5 billion project, not $40 billion. It has delivered last mile interconnects to 296,770 residences.
It's also a UK program and not a US program. The US has a similar program called BEAD, it has allocated $42B in funding, however, that is allocated, not spent budget. Build outs have only started this year.
Ezra Klein would point how how dangerous it is. In New York we had really big talk about a fiber buildout where it was clear they kept spending money and spending money in multiple rounds but nobody I knew was getting fiber well past the 2017 deadline the program claimed. They did lay a wholesale fiber to a place where I could get FTTN at 20Mbps and 10 years late they fixed up the poles by my house and say they’re going to give me real FTTH.
Trouble is these programs that just say they’re going to spend money as opposed to solve a problem make people cynical and just want to vote no on everything to protect their pocketbooks. Ultimately they turn the people who are the greatest supporters of these programs into enemies.
Yeah I'm sorry massive infrastructure projects with mandates to properly map access and measures to prevent fraud don't fit neatly into a four year presidential term before being effectively yanked away.
The cause of the delay or the blame doesn't really matter. The fact is Starlink could serve all of these users' internet now with no extra build-out cost at a 50th of the price. It's almost certainly time to rethink the plan and have the government take some of the money back.
I would think that repeatedly having to launch millions of pounds of infrastructure into low earth orbit counts as extra build-out cost. This is a literal physical constraint keeping this business from scaling like others, and I don't understand where this notion that Starlink is an acceptable alternative to fiber comes from.
Tell me more about this. I've yet to find a good summary! It happens here in California with PG&E with fire prevention money and infrastructure money; the executives declare victory early having spent a fraction of the allocated funds and then give themselves bonuses with the rest, for being such great managers. Then we get gigantic town-destroying wildfires that destroy people's lives.
The Biden program learned from that lesson to ensure that money was only delivered for performance rather than promises or rules-lawyering. See parent comment about Frontier actually laying fiber. But Trump had to kill it -- the GOP narrative about subsidy programs always being a waste would be disrupted if an effective program was in place.
Previous admin allocated a good chunk to upgrade to fiber network. Provider can claim 25% of installation cost. Frontier has been using it. I heard it's about to run out.
Their workers were staying at my hotel, and putting fiber in my community. It was fascinating how frontier practically hires contractor to lay down pipes, and another contractor to pull the fiber, and another contractor to splice it and another contractor to run fiber to the house, and another contractor to come and install in the house.
Yeah it was wild watching how many contractors came out when Google was rolling their fiber through my neighborhood, like it was different contractor groups for every step of the way. I'm not complaining a 5gbit connection is quite nice.
I hate the state intervention here. But let's not pretend the track record of the status quo was great.
This intervention is embarrassing and corrupt.
Infrastructure in america is also embarrassing, which I'm guessing is also some combo of corruption and self-inflicted wounds on state capacity.
Since the FCC no longer consistently enforces 'public good' requirements on commercial exploitation of limited shared common assets, they're increasingly becoming a drag on innovation and seem to primarily protect incumbants from new emerging competition.
In the early days of broadcast radio and TV it made sense to have an agency regulating use of the airwaves, but in recent decades the downsides of such close govt agency regulation on most (but not all) digital telecom are beginning to excede the upsides. And regulatory capture has turned some FCC rule-making committees into cage fight octagons where telecom lobbyists battle each other. Net neutrality is a punch line, spectrum auctions often fail and arcane media ownership rules made in the B&W TV era don't make sense. Maybe it's time to begin gradually sunsetting some of the FCC's historical remit.
Over the last 10 years I’ve moved 5 times. Each time having a fiber connection with at least symmetrical gigabit has been a hard requirement. Looking forward I’m considering moving again for very fast networking where I can begin to stream videos in 4k 60fps to small groups from my home, as well as offering a semi-permanent home for mid sized files (500mg-50gb).
The ability to download/upload large files without worry, and the decreased latency, are well worth the handful of neighborhoods I’ve declined based on this requirement.
Congratulations to France, for helping to make sure the future is more evenly distributed.
Can't speak for France but in Germany, you can usually check on each ISP's website what their coverage for a specific street address is. It's one of the things I always do when I look for a new home.
In the US, there are various websites for checking service availability based on zip code. You can fairly easily find local ISPs in a region and then use their own service checker to see if service is available at a specific address -- in other words, the same method you'd use if you already lived there and wanted to order service.
I’m curious what parent personally did, I can think of several solutions and am curious of their personal journey with this
Prioritizing that while potentially facing a deadline of moving out of an irreconcilable lease, living situation, job move, immigration move, or just for a change of pace
The usual complaint is that those sites are not accurate. Like back when I had 2Mbps DSL sites like that claimed I was served by 15+ ISPs that did not serve me.
I'm incredibly lucky (even in the US) that I have symmetric 5gbit connection and can go up to 8gbit if I wanted (but I don't have everything wired for 10gbit so it doesn't make sense right now). I'd love to see more of that in the US, but know it's not happening anytime soon.
I have 5Gbps symmetrical. I love having it, but the biggest use-case has been bragging about it to my colleagues. I haven't even had the full bandwidth available at my desk for a while now (I've had a terrible time terminating cat6a for reliable 10Gbe, so I'm usually on wifi), and it hasn't really bothered me much.
`high-speed internet` is not necessary a fiber though.
As recent as 2025 Videotron had been receiving subsidies to build cable network in a newly constructed neighborhood.
> cable can get up to 1Gbps, and probably higher, so it's a distinction without a difference.
Heavily disagree.
There is a distinction with a big difference. Currently deployed by Videotron cable solution is 940Mbps down and only 50Mbps up.
That's an abysmal upload speed.
Of course Videotron is aware that cable is dead end. (even though they still building it on subsidies).
That's why Videotron is offering to switch to Bell's fiber in some locations.
The Quebec Starlink subsidy program was terminated in early 2026, AFAICT. I'm not sure if it was for explicitly political reasons like the termination of the similar Ontario program was.
Here (in Canada), we are paying about USD$65/month for 500Mbps down and 500Mbps up. Our only choice is Xplornet (the provincial government sold monopoly rights to each area of the province) but I think their prices are regulated.
You have more problems than just the monopoly. Like the FCC, among other federal agencies, being completely captured by big business.
Spain is at 96.79% (June 2025), up from 94.79% a year before. See [0]
I think France and Spain are the best of the big European countries regarding coverage, but also adoption: If we look at the adoption ranking globally, Spain sits fourth at 90%, behind the UAE, China and South Korea and ahead of France at 83.6%.
Very few European countries convert coverage into subscriptions that efficiently, and I think it's driven by competition. You can get 500Mb symmetric connection for as little 10 euro [1], 20 for 2Gbps. DIGI has just gone crazy and in their own network they are offering symmetric 10Gbps for 25. Most people I know have 1Gbps because when is that not enough?
In Italy we are at 78% of addresses covered. That doesn't mean automatically that one gets fiber. First at all, if someone doesn't need to download heavy stuff and has a good coverage a 5G SIM with unlimited data (something you can get for 10/15 euros a month) is cheaper than a fiber connection (that starts from 25 euros).
Second a lot of people has still FTTC even if it has FTTH, mostly because FTTC offers a speed that is enough for most people (100Mbit/s) and upgrading may have costs (the installation of the fiber is at the expense of the ISP, but if you need to make modifications, such as put a pipe from your house to the street in which they will put the fiber, it's at your expense). In some cases even if fiber is present it's difficult/not possible to get it into your house (for example you live in a condo and the other tenants doesn't want to spend money to make the modifications that are needed to pass the wires).
In any case they have started to switch off copper (since it costs money to maintain an infrastructure that has decades), so either way customers will be forced to move to fiber or 5G network in the upcoming years. In any case a fault on a copper line is likely not to be repaired...
You can use any one of many MVNOs to get unlimited data for around that price, say less adjusted for household income, in the USA.
A favorite of mine is https://www.usmobile.com/ which is $25/mo list price (and less if you pay for the year, or if they're having a sale) which will give you Unlimited Data and 1GB a month of global roaming data
Only some places. Netherlands is €45-60 for 1 gbps (we don't make 4x-6x the money Spaniards do), unless you live in an area that actually sees multi-line competition.
We do have an interesting sidegrade: 5G Klik & Klaar from Odido (formerly T-Mobile / Deutsche Telekom) for €26. If you point it the right way out your window, you can get 700-1000 mbps down and 150 (capped) mbps up. Ping is around 35ms. Horrid modem firmware though, you get ping spikes up to 400-850ms (!!) under load due to bufferbloat, but you can of course solve that with your own router and SQM :+)
I do use US Mobile, and I recently switched to it because T-mobile made it so difficult to pay a bill, it was nearly impossible to get them to accept money.
And a ~decade ago in SF I did have Sonic 1Gbps symmetric fiber for something like $40 or $50/month, but that too is twice the cost of Italy.
In the U.S. I perceive MVNOs to be a scam. Like Tracfone was OK in 2011 but somewhere afterwards it became normal to go around rural upstate NY and no service and go around NYC and no service and go to LA and no service.
This year I got a real phone with a real plan and I have coverage in many places now me I can finally see why people get excited about apps.
That's kind of a broad brush, Google Fi is great, especially the fact that they work mostly seamlessly for the same price in like every country, and they're an MVNO.
It proves that you can’t trust the claim that “it is the same network”, I mean it is the same network but you may find yourself riding the back of the bus and there is no independent way to check what service you are actually getting.
Well I never expected it to be treated exactly the same as their first party customers, did you? Especially if I’m paying a much lower rate. Just have to evaluate the actual results, and hop if you’re unhappy. I’ve been extremely happy with mine, so I’ve stuck with it. It’s a bad choice if you’re out and about a lot, since it’s not cheap when you go unlimited data, but working from home on WiFi, the metered option, I end up paying like $30-$40/mo, and there’s no need to go get a new sim when I travel. For a different lifestyle shape, I’d be shopping for one that fit that better.
I have both T-Mobile via a family plan and US Mobile (AT&T MVNO) via a yearly plan.
US Mobile serves as my data eSIM, where it gives me unlimited hotspot 20GB of roaming/month. Previously I bought eSIMs when traveling since T-Mobile is only 5GB/mo hotspot/roaming and earlier at 256 Kbps.
T-Mobile is better for calls and international texts, due to it being unlimited. I also prefer keeping a non-MVNO as my call/text number so I can go to a T-Mobile store and activate a spare phone if I lose mine (which I never did), or my phone fails. With US Mobile, I'm not sure how I'd recover a lost phone.
Since the Pixel 10 Pro lacks a SIM card slot, this is important. But hey, I used my Pixel 3 on Sprint with eSIM; I went T-Mobile 3 months before they merged.
US Mobile has done well with me, although anything not-T-Mobile is really slow nowadays.
Can't speak for Italy, but there have been some consequences in many EU jurisdictions. The EU has been pushing HARD for competition, etc, but it has left many European telecoms in debt-heavy financial situations that has caused issues around future investment and in some countries the (mobile) coverage is good on paper, but the networks are themselves actually terrible (looking at you Germany).
But yeah, it's otherwise a problem with competition enforcement.
The main issue with copper comes from the active infrastructure rather than the physical lines.
I work at an ISP that gets DSLAM equipment from Huawei, we run one of the few G.fast VDSL deployments in the world using this particular hardware. Huawei has stopped manufacturing this product line (the Swiss market is a rounding error ;), which will force us to fully migrate some neighborhoods, only for backup inventory.
Germany being 15 years late, I assume you can still buy similar hardware from AVM though.
It’s not uncommon for cities to be worse than rural areas now. In Ireland, nearly all rural premises have 10gbit-capable fibre available (will be literally all by early next year) but parts of central Dublin are stuck with VDSL. Retrofitting in cities can be quite slow and expensive.
I am in Italy right now, in fact, spent a lot of time here. I can safely say, the 5G sim coverage is extremely spotty, and when you can get internet from a physical line, it's generally pretty poor speeds. I am pretty sure a lot of that 78% includes 1 bar of LTE coverage, so it's "technically" true.
Because deploying fiber is so hard in NYC, I use Calyx Institute (https://calyxinstitute.org/membership) on a MikroTik Chateau 5G R16. Calyx uses T-Mobile towers. I use the internet via L2TP to a VPS to give me a static IPv4 and IPv6 /56 block. This is only for upload speeds. I get 45-80 Mbps uploads.
I used Spectrum for four months but because of my L2TP setup, DOCSIS ACK suppression doesn't work; it's TCP inside L2TP UDP and then ACKs are then sent over the wire. This meant sluggish internet under load. Spectrum did install a high-split amp but it's still not turned on afaict.
Row townhouses in Brooklyn and Queens have Fios, but not in Manhattan. I wish I could just do a NYT ad but that'd force me to liquidate a decent chunk of my E*Trade and J.P. Morgan accounts.
I am right now visiting Belgium and I saw multiple towns, including historic neighborhoods with Proximus fiber splitters: Brussels, Antwerpe, Ghent and Bruges. The fiber and Telenet Coax is so well organized when compared to NYC's coax mess. However, where Fios is available, Verizon does an okay job with organizing fiber.
Verizon said killing line sharing would bring more fiber. Yet Proximus built fiber in historic cities more than Verizon did. I don't believe Orange France legally has to share fiber, but in return Orange can't block Free/SFR with payola deals.
Several of the issues you point have been solved in France via regulations (on the ISP and on the tenants of condos). It tools several years, even decades, but we ended up with fiber regulations that are good (could have been better and faster).
UK is at 85% FTTH or 91% gigabit (including DOCSIS): https://labs.thinkbroadband.com/local/. Given VM are a fair way through their XGS-PON upgrade it'll probably be 90%+ FTTH imminently.
I pay £6 per month for a sim only contract, which gives me 4GB of data. In the USA I feel like I was paying closer to $40-50 for a google fi sim? Which admittedly did have better roaming. Now I just get an e-sim for travel and it works out to be £3ish per day
I spent time in the interior of Portugal that had fibre internet, it was very impressive and incredibly helpful to the village. Better payment services and banking for example.
Yep... was on the countryside for the Summer in places so small they didn't even have a bakery, which in France matters.
What did they have though? Optic fiber, high bandwidth, low latency, reliable and for a very low price.
Honestly I think ADSL was already enough for most people, I mean non professionals, but now I think France has the infrastructure for a good enough Internet for the next few decades. I can't fathom normal usages that would need higher bandwidth and lower latency.
The "sad" thing is that it is generally not advantageous for people to have both a phone data plan and an internet box plan if the latter is not shared so a lot of people have a fiber connection on their wall but still use their phone as hotspot since bigger data plan < reasonnable data plan + internet box plan
It's not the end of the world but it feels like a wasted effort. I don't know what the solution is.
I've never heard of a fiber connection with a data cap like that. I ended up moving to fiber eventually, it was cheaper for the same speed and the upload speed matched the download speed as well.
Bufferbloat was horrendous with Comcast so latency varied wildly depending on what was happening on the network. The only way around it was to cap download and upload to 80%, and that's a large dent on the already anemic upload. And I had to cap client upload too, otherwise one client could easily saturate upload and now not even TCP ACK packets were being reliably sent.
The main problem isn't cable per se, is the asymmetric link.
EDIT: Also 1Gbps symmetric allows me to backup my NAS offsite without impacting anyone else.
What I did notice was the 1mbit/s upload speed that came with it. Uploading large files to Google Drive was impossible, not just slow but would actually time out, plus bad things happen when you saturate the uplink that way.
For buried infrastructure where the coaxial cable company already sells internet, you will almost never recoup your investment to bury new fiber and run it to all the homes. You can have the superior product, but insufficient people will pay enough more than the existing coaxial cable prices.
I got underground fiber direct to the basement of a student apartment years ago and it was basically a hundred dollars for install fees. They must have already been laying it on the street, but still. Competition?
Probably a main difference is that the Swedish infrastructure was deployed by municipalities with an open access model, so no need for 10 different ISPs to dig their own cabling.
As a result, many rural areas have way better internet than big cities.
I'm not expecting you to do that, but I want to trigger some discussion on what are the exact reasons we all don't do that.
I work from home 1 or 2 days a week. My current bandwidth is more than sufficient for my personal usage. And I exclusively use Wifi, other than a TV and a Nintendo Switch that happen to be right next to the router so are plugged in. So even if I had fiber, I literally wouldn't know a difference because my wifi would be the bottleneck still.
Back when Google Fiber was rolling in, no one I knew was looking forward to it because they had need for the increased bandwidth. They looked forward to it because the expectation of a 'Google' branded product was better than the expectation of a 'Comcast' branded product. It was more about the expected uptime and consistency.
When I moved there like 10yrs ago I thought I would finally have 1gig fiber, but bandwidth was on par with what I had with my parent's VDSL connection from the country side, and latencies were worse, I went from sub-5ms to 30ms because many servers were actually in LA and the routes were bad (I expected ~1ms per 100km, not ~5ms/100km).
ISP gerrymandering to avoid competition was unexpected coming from the land of free markets
It worked for the French.
> The Carr FCC said last year that the gigabit goal “may be unreasonably prejudicial to technologies such as satellite and fixed wireless that presently do not support such speeds.”
I don't know if this is so much a handout to Starlink, seems like a way to win the race by moving the finish line.
though if we want to be fair, the competition is other telecoms that were also abusing the handouts until very recently
It's also a UK program and not a US program. The US has a similar program called BEAD, it has allocated $42B in funding, however, that is allocated, not spent budget. Build outs have only started this year.
Trouble is these programs that just say they’re going to spend money as opposed to solve a problem make people cynical and just want to vote no on everything to protect their pocketbooks. Ultimately they turn the people who are the greatest supporters of these programs into enemies.
Any money given to fiber rollout is still paying dividends in 40 years.
Their workers were staying at my hotel, and putting fiber in my community. It was fascinating how frontier practically hires contractor to lay down pipes, and another contractor to pull the fiber, and another contractor to splice it and another contractor to run fiber to the house, and another contractor to come and install in the house.
This intervention is embarrassing and corrupt. Infrastructure in america is also embarrassing, which I'm guessing is also some combo of corruption and self-inflicted wounds on state capacity.
In the early days of broadcast radio and TV it made sense to have an agency regulating use of the airwaves, but in recent decades the downsides of such close govt agency regulation on most (but not all) digital telecom are beginning to excede the upsides. And regulatory capture has turned some FCC rule-making committees into cage fight octagons where telecom lobbyists battle each other. Net neutrality is a punch line, spectrum auctions often fail and arcane media ownership rules made in the B&W TV era don't make sense. Maybe it's time to begin gradually sunsetting some of the FCC's historical remit.
The ability to download/upload large files without worry, and the decreased latency, are well worth the handful of neighborhoods I’ve declined based on this requirement.
Congratulations to France, for helping to make sure the future is more evenly distributed.
Its something I usually find out later
The information is available publicly on the same web site as mentioned in this thread, with even information about the expected network throughput: https://maconnexioninternet.arcep.fr/?lat=46&lng=2.3&zoom=7&...
Prioritizing that while potentially facing a deadline of moving out of an irreconcilable lease, living situation, job move, immigration move, or just for a change of pace
The nice thing though, is that latency is great independent of other traffic as bandwidth is pretty much never saturated
An exception is Steam, but I don't download games that often.
And also the fact that they have crazy low prices which forced the 3 other ISPs to stay competitive
Canada as a whole is expected to have 90% high speed internet by the end of 2026, and 100% by 2030.
Still, cable can get up to 1Gbps, and probably higher, so it's a distinction without a difference.
The push to make sure that 100% of people have access to high-speed internet is the most important thing.
Heavily disagree. There is a distinction with a big difference. Currently deployed by Videotron cable solution is 940Mbps down and only 50Mbps up. That's an abysmal upload speed.
Of course Videotron is aware that cable is dead end. (even though they still building it on subsidies). That's why Videotron is offering to switch to Bell's fiber in some locations.
"Cable is equivalent" only if you don't need/want a symmetric connection - until they lay fiber I'm stuck with an awful upload speed.
You can get 8 Gigabit symmetric home internet from Bell but not IPv6.
can government STOP this fucking spectrum(Charter Communications) monopoly.
You have more problems than just the monopoly. Like the FCC, among other federal agencies, being completely captured by big business.
Though I know from experience that if you try to get rid of TV service they find a way to charge you more for just internet.
I think France and Spain are the best of the big European countries regarding coverage, but also adoption: If we look at the adoption ranking globally, Spain sits fourth at 90%, behind the UAE, China and South Korea and ahead of France at 83.6%.
Very few European countries convert coverage into subscriptions that efficiently, and I think it's driven by competition. You can get 500Mb symmetric connection for as little 10 euro [1], 20 for 2Gbps. DIGI has just gone crazy and in their own network they are offering symmetric 10Gbps for 25. Most people I know have 1Gbps because when is that not enough?
[0]: https://digital.gob.es/en/telecomunicaciones-infraestructura...
[1]: https://www.digimobil.es/fibra-optica/
Second a lot of people has still FTTC even if it has FTTH, mostly because FTTC offers a speed that is enough for most people (100Mbit/s) and upgrading may have costs (the installation of the fiber is at the expense of the ISP, but if you need to make modifications, such as put a pipe from your house to the street in which they will put the fiber, it's at your expense). In some cases even if fiber is present it's difficult/not possible to get it into your house (for example you live in a condo and the other tenants doesn't want to spend money to make the modifications that are needed to pass the wires).
In any case they have started to switch off copper (since it costs money to maintain an infrastructure that has decades), so either way customers will be forced to move to fiber or 5G network in the upcoming years. In any case a fault on a copper line is likely not to be repaired...
These sorts of prices are unheard of in the US, so incredibly low.
Something has gone deeply wrong with US telecommunications.
A favorite of mine is https://www.usmobile.com/ which is $25/mo list price (and less if you pay for the year, or if they're having a sale) which will give you Unlimited Data and 1GB a month of global roaming data
If you pay $45 you can get unlimited data from Mint for $15/mo: https://www.mintmobile.com/plans/
It's not unheard of!
It's actually the high speed internet at home that is less competitive - the prices in Europe are unheard of.
We do have an interesting sidegrade: 5G Klik & Klaar from Odido (formerly T-Mobile / Deutsche Telekom) for €26. If you point it the right way out your window, you can get 700-1000 mbps down and 150 (capped) mbps up. Ping is around 35ms. Horrid modem firmware though, you get ping spikes up to 400-850ms (!!) under load due to bufferbloat, but you can of course solve that with your own router and SQM :+)
And a ~decade ago in SF I did have Sonic 1Gbps symmetric fiber for something like $40 or $50/month, but that too is twice the cost of Italy.
This year I got a real phone with a real plan and I have coverage in many places now me I can finally see why people get excited about apps.
US Mobile serves as my data eSIM, where it gives me unlimited hotspot 20GB of roaming/month. Previously I bought eSIMs when traveling since T-Mobile is only 5GB/mo hotspot/roaming and earlier at 256 Kbps.
T-Mobile is better for calls and international texts, due to it being unlimited. I also prefer keeping a non-MVNO as my call/text number so I can go to a T-Mobile store and activate a spare phone if I lose mine (which I never did), or my phone fails. With US Mobile, I'm not sure how I'd recover a lost phone.
Since the Pixel 10 Pro lacks a SIM card slot, this is important. But hey, I used my Pixel 3 on Sprint with eSIM; I went T-Mobile 3 months before they merged.
US Mobile has done well with me, although anything not-T-Mobile is really slow nowadays.
But yeah, it's otherwise a problem with competition enforcement.
The EU also has incredibly low salaries.
I work at an ISP that gets DSLAM equipment from Huawei, we run one of the few G.fast VDSL deployments in the world using this particular hardware. Huawei has stopped manufacturing this product line (the Swiss market is a rounding error ;), which will force us to fully migrate some neighborhoods, only for backup inventory.
Germany being 15 years late, I assume you can still buy similar hardware from AVM though.
> UK is at 85% FTTH [on a sibling comment]
Meanwhile I have 1 Gb/s FTTH in an Italian village of less than 100 souls, while I couldn’t reach 300 Mbit/s on copper in London zone 4.
I have been surprised at how well they have improved the situation in Italy, and in dismay at how terrible it is in UK.
My brother in the UK has 1Gb/s fibre in a village of less than 100.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Internet_...
Complete bullshit.
BUL maybe is close to that percentage
P1G is nowhere near and is never going to reach full coverage in 2030.
I used Spectrum for four months but because of my L2TP setup, DOCSIS ACK suppression doesn't work; it's TCP inside L2TP UDP and then ACKs are then sent over the wire. This meant sluggish internet under load. Spectrum did install a high-split amp but it's still not turned on afaict.
Row townhouses in Brooklyn and Queens have Fios, but not in Manhattan. I wish I could just do a NYT ad but that'd force me to liquidate a decent chunk of my E*Trade and J.P. Morgan accounts.
I am right now visiting Belgium and I saw multiple towns, including historic neighborhoods with Proximus fiber splitters: Brussels, Antwerpe, Ghent and Bruges. The fiber and Telenet Coax is so well organized when compared to NYC's coax mess. However, where Fios is available, Verizon does an okay job with organizing fiber.
Verizon said killing line sharing would bring more fiber. Yet Proximus built fiber in historic cities more than Verizon did. I don't believe Orange France legally has to share fiber, but in return Orange can't block Free/SFR with payola deals.
Cellular plans are also a lot cheaper in Europe :(
What did they have though? Optic fiber, high bandwidth, low latency, reliable and for a very low price.
Honestly I think ADSL was already enough for most people, I mean non professionals, but now I think France has the infrastructure for a good enough Internet for the next few decades. I can't fathom normal usages that would need higher bandwidth and lower latency.
It's not the end of the world but it feels like a wasted effort. I don't know what the solution is.