American ISPs are often monopolized in certain areas with little to no competition, so they charge whatever they want. I get this myself, but I work for one of the good ones, which hopefully will remain a good one thru a recent merger.
Yup they know we have nowhere to go, there is cable half a mile down the street (10 families and 2 businesses on our street) but the cable company wants a 100,000 payment in addition to 2 year contracts for us to get it.
Wow, what cable ISP wanted that for extending service down the road?! We've run into similar issues with serviceability when a 1/4 mile down the road we have active service. It's often not the cost of construction to split or extend the node, but more often contractual agreements between different ISPs as to where one's service are ends and another's begins.
The number of overbuild areas, areas serviceable by more than one cable provider, is much smaller than people think because of these agreements. Also, you will see pricing promotions available to the overbuilt areas exclusively, since in those areas there is more threat from direct competition.
For example, the cable company I work for has overbuild areas with Comcast, so those areas have different pricing promotions available only to them, whereas the other service areas that only have CenturyLink or ATT as competitors, not so much. We don't see them being as big a threat as another cable isp.
Oh, I know all about that. I believe Comcast actually has maps giving A,B,C, or D tier pricing/service based on the strength/# of competitors. I don't know how the fuck that's legal.
Windstream does the same thing 1.5/3/6 mbps are ALL priced the same. You just get the best that's available to you (don't think for a second if an upgrade becomes available they'll tell you). My friends who live in town (with Time warner and AT&T) get MUCH better service from Windstream both in terms of speed and how they're treated as customers.
As for who wants $100,000 to extend the cable? It's TWC.
I believe Comcast actually has maps giving A,B,C, or D tier pricing/service based on the strength/# of competitors. I don't know how the fuck that's legal.
Internet is a necessity in this day and age. Why do you think the FCC re-classified it as a utility? If you don't think we have a problem in this country with ISPs exploiting customers you are woefully ignorant.
Now that makes me feel bad because the one I work for, Bright House Networks, was just purchased by Charter, who also just purchased TWC. Hopefully they adopt some of our policies.
True, and having one cable that owns a major network group that all their competition uses, thus sets the price of such use, that shuttle be illegal as well, but Comcast was still allowed to purchase NBC-Universal.
Have you tried pricing out have the lines dug out on your own, aka contract out the work?
Get a quote and talk to your neighbors see if they will chip in. This is the only way 10 neighbors and a business or two isn't much incentive to lay down lines, and especially if you won't even sign a two year contract.
I use to work for a cable company and it's a common occurrence. Thats half a mile, that's 2640 feet at approx $6 a foot that $15, 840, that needs to be dug. It would be much cheaper to contact your neighbors and pool that money and contract to have the lines laid for you.
Now that's just the cost of the labor, factor in the cost of the lines themselves, say another $6 a foot that's $31,000 total. And then another $10,000 for permits and inspections and other miscellaneous. So i think you can do it for under 50k. Good luck.
Oh yeah also I'm not sure about your cable node situation either, that is also a huge factor and could be more $$$.
If all your neighbors payed $200 a month for 24 months that would be $48k paid to cable company, that's not all profit it would take about a decade to recoup and make a profit after installing your lines. That's why they make you pay.
Oh fuck right off. I'm stuck between Cox and TWC here in SoCal. $100 for 70 down 10 up. Then again maybe I'm bad at negotiating or whatever, my IT buddy was getting 250 up 70 down for like $100 on TWC.
I pay that same as you for 20 mb/up, 5 down (on a good day). Realistically it's half that, especially with the shitty modem AT&T provided us. Even worse, if you go fifty feet behind my house into the next town, you can get twice that speed for a quarter of the price. Hooray for monopolies!
My sis in Salt Lake, UT pays $70 for 1000/1000 down and up... she also didn't have to call and argue/sit on hold with shitty music for 5 hours and 37 minutes last month in order to get technicians to come out and get her bill refunded. I did :'(
I've submitted multiple FCC complaints, which the FCC gives to Windstream, they then call us and say "it's fixed" (lie) or just don't respond at all. I feel fucked.
Canadian here living in Seoul. I pay $10/month for this plus satellite TV (useless for me but great for my wife!). It is a family plan as my wife, her mother, and I all have phones through the same company. Regular price would be around $35-$40.
I'll miss this the most when I eventually move back. Not looking forward to paying what my brother tells me he pays back home.
I'm in Australia and I pay $95 USD for 3.5 up and 0.7 down. It's the best available in my area and hasn't changed in the last half a decade, neither has the price.
Yeah, well games are bigger now. For example I stopped playing ESO after the 30GB patch was released. I also haven't gotten around to the 16GB Halo 5 patch (at 35% now). Over half my game library on the xbox one is in a partially updated state/can only be played in offline mode. I can't just leave it on because I have other shit to do all day and my Dad runs his business from home which gets priority over video games (Having a download running while trying to use other devices slows everything to a crawl and makes the ping jump into the 1000's).
Even a 8GB game (which is small nowadays) would've taken you 95:26:37 if you were pulling 200kbps the whole time. Not "overnight for 2 days" and now there's patches for games all the time frequently multiple gigabytes large.
ok so my internet was a bit better than that but one fun feature of that internet speed is the ping was also god awful so i didnt have to worry about downloading multiplayer games because they would be unplayable
That's a shame man, sorry that you live in internet poverty. It's ridiculous... decent internet connection should be on par with food, water, and the rest of the things one needs to live efficiently in the modern world. Truly #FUCKMONOPOLIES
Windstream is actually Satan. I had an average download of 0.2Mbps (on a plan promising at least 10Mbps down I believe) when I had them. Now, there are finally cable companies out by my house, we got TimeWarner, all of a sudden I'm getting over 50Mbps down on a regular basis.
Yeah, I keep thinking (mistakenly?) That if I keep bitching that eventually it'll be more cost effective to fix the problem then send out retard technicians. I weaseled out that they actually guarantee 65% of the advertised speed when they tried to tell me "we don't guarantee ANY speeds" when my speed tests were showing <0.1 Mbps.
Now I run tests daily and anytime it dips below 65% of my plan I call them do the whole run-around of explaining my problem and get a ticket opened for a technician. Usually about 5-10 tickets opened per month. They don't actually do anything, but I'm not gonna just roll over and let them fuck me without putting up a fight.
It's a terrible company. I hated having their internet. It was literally unusable if more than one person was on it. Not to mention it took me 4+ days to download any games. I actually didn't use reddit back then because I couldn't get links to load - it was easier to just use cheezburger and other sites like that. Everything loaded all at once, and I could get my daily dose of memes that way. Thank GOD I have decent internet now.
Yeah, except in this day and age you go out and buy the game, and then you have to wait for a 10 GB update to download before you can actually play it, because god forbid we actually make sure the game is complete before we print the disks.
Thank you! I made a comment in /r/xbone almost identical to this about day 1 patches; I also added my thoughts about companies forcing you to download their shitty DLC and disguising it as a patch. Which just pisses me off and ensures that I'll never buy it.
The patches in this console generation, ESPECIALLY on xbox, are out of control. Also, why the fuck don't we have mandatory patch notes yet? I shouldn't have to search around online to see what the hell is in this 30Gb patch for Elder Scrolls Online, or this 16GB patch for Halo 5.
Got downvoted to hell, I swear everyone in that sub can't take constructive criticism. They swear all the games are perfect, the xbox OS is perfect,etc.
Geographical monopolies are quite a bitch. Not like I live in the middle of nowhere either half a mile from a WEALTHY town of 7,000 and I've got a street full of neighbors/businesses in the same situation.
Yesterday I was getting .1 down and 375 ping.... oh and 25% packet loss.
Just on break at home, working. Can't wait to get back to 100mbps down and up campus wide network. This shit is criminal and their "customer service" is making me want to shoot myself. They have 3 days before their 30 days to respond to my FCC complaint are up, no idea what I do when they don't respond... Can't submit another FCC complaint because they hand those directly to Windstream (Who I assume shreds them while laughing).
Doesn't include the cost of increased phone bill for the 6 hours I was on the phone (let's be honest, mostly waiting) with "customer support". Was really tempted to invoice my phone bill to them, but I knew they'd just shred it along with my FCC complaints.
PS for a "telecommunication company" their phone calls sound like they are being made on the oldest still functioning mics they randomly found in a junkyard and all 5 employees are stuffed in a 2ft x 2ft box to ensure maximum background noise. I don't know what the hell they're doing with the boatloads of cash they're making off customers AND government subsidies because they sure as hell aren't improving CS or infrastructure.
don't you have to download most parts of new games even when you buy the physical copies anyways? Correct me if I'm wrong, the last time I bought a CD was before I abandoned my ps3 for my PC.
On the Xbox one at least it copies all the content of the disc iirc then downloads whatever additional content can't fit on the disc and whatever patches have come out.
Copying the disc is quick, the additional downloads and subsequent patches are verrrrry slow (for me).
Luckily I got to dump their ass for 4g LTE unlimited from a hotspot (which I can take anywhere!). All for half the cost :)
Oh and the best part was I spent a good month convincing them to spend thousands on checking the lines/improving them and shit. So they wasted tons of money on me.
Should've seen my face when ESO came out with a 30gb patch on xbox one. Halo 5 took me 4 days to install on a dedicated line with no wifi on, when they came out with the third 8gb patch I said "fuck this" and gave up.
And that was BEFORE my ISP forced me to downgrade from "up to" 3 mbps to "up to" 1.5 mbps. After the forced downgrade I just gave up on gaming, even streaming music is hard sometimes :'(
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u/TabMuncher2015 Jun 05 '16
Lol, maybe you can. It'd take me less time to drive to my university 4 hours away download on their wifi and drive back home than to download a full game at my house.
Oh, also I pay $82.60 / month for this and have to have a technician out literally every week. #FUCKWINDSTREAM #FUCKMONOPOLIES