this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Hugely location dependent.
Sure, but I live in 'socialist' Europe and I can already choose from 13 ISPs on fiber alone. I can only dream of the amount of choice people in 'free market' USA must have.
Sure, and that's great for you! I am, honestly, envious.
However, you said "you could switch." For many people, including me, we cannot switch while maintaining a reasonable connection. My options are my current ISP (really not too bad, for the first time in my life), an ISP that provides a maximum of 12Mbps, an ISP that still isn't quite sure if it can provide service to me, or satellite (which is pretty awful for a variety of services I use regularly). Even discarding reasonable expectations, this is not a "dozen or so."
While your proposal might be good for you and others in "socialist" Europe, many people (likely even outside of Europe and the USA) don't have that option and it probably doesn't help resolve the parent commenter's complaint.
Edit: also, while the USA is behind Europe in many ways, I suspect this is not so much a Europe vs USA issue as a rural vs not issue.
On the contrary, here the rural areas got fiber way before the cities did. It's a lot less difficult to install fiber in rural areas compared to densely populated cities where the ground is already full of cables and pipes, and where the impact of having to close streets for digging are much bigger.
Even now, the fastest consumer internet is available in a small town in the middle of fscking nowhere, where they installed 10gbit fiber.
Gotcha, thank you for the edification.
I am in the Communist country referred to as Italy, there are only 2 companies who actually have 4g infrastructures AFAIK, and the dozens of other carriers just rent the infrastructure from the tim/Wind3 duopoly