arstechnica.com — ISPs may not act for years on local complaints about slow Internet—but when a town rolls out its own solution, it's amazing how fast the incumbents can deploy fiber, cut prices, and run to the legislature.
Oct 28, 2009 View in Crawl 4
mmaster23Oct 29, 2009
Eindhoven, the Netherlands baby :) .. and yes that other thing is still very legal here.
bearingNov 2, 2009
I pay around 150$CAD/month for 7.5mbps internet(30GB CAP), TV, telephone.Not rural.
Closed AccountNov 2, 2009
Im paying $50 for 5MB down, 512k up in NW Texas. Would it be out of line to say, "Shut it!" ?
opticwindNov 3, 2009
I'm with giz. I live in Nagoya, and lived in Osaka, and internet here is drastically overrated by Americans. My dorm in Osaka had near dial-up speed, my apartment was at best 300kb/s, and my current setup is 1mb/s for about $40 a month. Exactly like my old US apartment. In Osaka I'd heard about some of the "gbit" service but here's a secret...it's BULLs**t. You buy 7mb/s internet, and get MAYBE 1mb/s. What companies list in Japanese manuals and ads are typically the maximum speed possible, and dumbass people who think they can translate see those and write them down as the average speed for Japanese internet. Giz, ignore them if they don't believe you because of some wiki entry, we both know how mediocre the internet is here.
riptechtvNov 9, 2009
In my part of the city we only have Verizon DSL or Charter Cable. My city is ran by a bunch of old bats and the city planner or something like that decided a few years ago that FIOS priority would go on the other side of town first and work its way to mine. Then came the great recession and Verizon decided to greatly slow down deployment. I should have had it this December but thats been pushed back to late spring of 2010. As for pricing I decided to call Verizon and threaten to cancel my Internet and switch to Charter so they took my speed down from 3M to 1M for $20.00 a month for 2 years. I hate life since I downgraded.
dirtylaundry101Nov 12, 2009
Western Australia. $50/month<a class="user" href="http://www.speedtest.net/result/620056819.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.speedtest.net/result/620056819.png</a>
foamyheadNov 14, 2009
@nofx1510The downstream is a bit low. I recently ran a test and got around 90 Mb/s
kibibytebrainNov 15, 2009
There really is nothing wrong or even illegal about being a monopoly. Where the problems come in is when a monopoly leverages its its dominance in one area to enhance competition by other means(for example, legal means as seen here) or in other markets.(for example, by tying products and services for which there is no purpose except to extend their monopoly) This is why its "anti-trust" law, and not anti-monopoly law. And the real key is a company need not be a true monopoly to be in gross anti-trust violation. Generally anti-competitive actions can be done through both free market and regulated markets, and companies often use both mechanisms to do so, so neither is really in practice free from blemishes.
ole1kanobeNov 16, 2009
Competition is definitely good, here in southern MN the local utility installed a city wide wireless setup. Top speed is only 3M, but you can use your account anywhere within the city via any wireless enabled device. I use it and pay $35.00/month and get 2 - 3M up and down.The local cable company's 5M (shared bandwidth) for the same price (if you also get cable service, otherwise it is $65/month).Qwest who I started with, signing up for a 'deal' of $29.00/month that they doubled the price on after 3 months and only got speeds of up to 1.3M.
pureeviljesterMar 9, 2010
we have cox and comcast as well.rediculous!