You're not wrong. It's amazing how poor access can be.
I live in a tiny town on Vancouver Island and I have gigabit symmetric, for a very reasonable price. When I lived in Vancouver that simply wasn't an option.
Yeah. In my particular case the utility was already paid to deploy fiber, but they did “fiber to the node” which runs fiber to the DSL station. It’s still copper from there to the house, and in my case (end of the line in a cul de sac) it’s degraded down to only 30Mbps max bandwidth.
Unless the local node is completely saturated, I would expect you should be able to get much in excess of that. If you're ever up at 2 am try running a speed test then.
I'd also try to rule out everything on your side, house wiring, routers, switches. Basically try to speed test it with the line they wired directly to the outside.
And upgrade any old network hardware.
Unless you're talking all they offer is 30Mbps. Then that's an ISP problem.
My opinion- Internet providers running cables through public land are a natural monopoly but aren’t really regulated as such in most of the US, where it is believed that because DSL and an 5G cell phone plan exists there is competition.
that's wild, my parents in a pop.~ 1000 rural town in france get 2GB fiber; the next "average" town (60k inhabitants) is 30km away, and the next big town (Toulouse, pop. 460k) is 120km away
It still tickles me when people wonder why Starlink is anything someone would want.
The telcos were all given deals with assurances that they would bring rural America to something resembling what their urban counterparts have, but they've remained stagnant for some time now.
Starlink has finally given those people hope of seeing reasonable connectivity options. I would add in that T-Mobile Home Internet, and the likes, are doing so too, but on not as grand of a scale.
I'm starting the process of shifting to Australia (from NZ), and this is going to be the hardest pill to swallow - I'm paying $83 AU for 900/400 currently!
It’s because of Silicon Valley I think. We all got broadband with the first generation of technology in the 90’s. Since then, there has been so much government subsidies for rolling out internet infrastructure that no telco will invest in upgrades unless there is government money to pay for it. But most of those subsidies only apply to new deployments, not upgrades. We don’t qualify because we already have “broadband” (which here just means faster than dialup). So nobody is willing to pony up the cash for fiber-to-the-home deployments.
It's surprising that it would still need government subsidies to start with. I'm not really into the details of such thing that much, but around here (northern Europe) we're basically getting fiber everywhere, first in cities but later also in very rural and (by European standards) low-population areas, and there are no subsidies involved. Private companies compete and goes to communities (in rural areas) or neighborhoods (in city- or city-like areas) and try to drum up interest, and if there's enough interest they start digging. And in densely populated areas it's a no-brainer, they just do it. Due to competition (just more than one supplier and you have the competition) it's kind of "got to start this area before the competitor does.."
The fiber is also used for TV etc., with several providers on the same fiber, so I imagine that the fiber provider gets income from the competing TV providers as well. Could be part of the why. As for myself, I only need and only pay for actual internet.
I've had 1Gb/1Gb fiber for many years now, and lately fiber arrives in the most unexpected areas (long distances, few residents). It (the deployment, not the monthly) used to be more costly, but it's not anymore. And no public money involved. I know that it used to be, as an experiment, a couple of decades or more ago, but only in certain areas.
This problem is by no means limited to the US. Germany has that problem as well in rural areas and there government is also providing subsidies to expand broadband access.
Sometimes this can even be a problem in cities when the available infrastructure is at the limit. It's quite possible to move to an area, after having checked that good internet is available and suddenly the provider says no when signing up.
Yep! I lived all over the Bay Area for the last 20 years and I never had the option for fiber until I moved to Oakland two months ago. It’s only $40 a month for symmetric gigabit fiber. But before I simply had no option for it.
I think you took for granted the mere availability of fiber as an option.
30Mbps DSL is the best option I have, other than Starlink. And I live in San Jose!