this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2023
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I have 500Mbps in Spain. Is it that bad in the American cities or is it only like rural Montana that has these speeds?
Honestly, it's highly variable. Generally speaking, more populated areas tend to have much better options for internet and in some large markets even have a degree of competition.
In my case, I live in a town of only 180k or so people. At my home, I am able to get 1.2 gbps download from Comcast. They are the only option in my direct vicinity with this much bandwidth. The alernative is AT&T with only DSL as an option. I don't remember the top tier. But, it's considerably slower at maybe 100 mbps or something like that.
Wow, that's pretty good for a town of that size. I live in a city of 1.6 Million. I think I might be able to get 1 gbps if I shop around, but I don't think much more than that is available to normal consumers at least.
The issue is mostly that it’s highly variable, hard to change without moving, and hard to predict before you actually live somewhere.
The comcast rep will happily take your money to put you on a 200mb plan, but it won’t do shit if the infrastructure in your area is bad, and Comcast (or whoever the isp is) has absolutely zero responsibility to actually provide the promised services. Now you add in that 95% of the population including most of the phone reps working for the ISPs don’t even know the difference between a bit and a byte and it becomes a total crap shoot.
...wow. That's so shit. Where I live, your internet provider has to have the ability to provide the service or like with every other service provider it's really open for lawyer action.
This also makes so that internet providers are at the same time keeping their own infrastructure around which in turn makes that yet another selling point ("we have up to 1 gbps in your area!") and makes them keep it in top-notch condition.
That's the same here too. My first apartment only had ADSL. In 2015.
I couldn't even watch Netflix without it stopping to buffer.
I really wish they would put internet speeds on apartment offers etc.
It's widely variable, even in big cities the available ISPs can change depending on what side of a street you're on. A lot of people are stuck with cable (DOCSIS) providers that run over legacy TV infrastructure and provide wildly asymmetric speeds. This is an excerpt from Xfinity (Comcast):
I live in the mountain area, and my friend lives 30m from a multi-million population city, in an area with over 100,000 residents. His best option for internet to this day is hotspotting from his cell. Before that was viable, he only had access to satellite internet. Even semi-rural people here get fucked.
It took me a beat to realize this was 30 miles or 30 minutes and not 30 meters.
Ah that’s my bad, should’ve used metric.
Oh, metric isn’t a requirement (although I myself am striving to use it when I remember), just that “m” alone is ambiguous. And in my daily work, a number followed by a single m is meters.