Internet Providers

[SERIOUSLY THOUGH*]

Hooo boy, here we go.
Let's talk internet providers (IPs). I say this because there seems to be such a huge difference between providers in various countries.

I'll explain the situation in France. In the beginning, there were a few providers (Orange, Bouygues Telecom, SFR) who had a tripartite monopoly, setting high prices and providing mediocre speed of service. Then came Free. Free offered what the others did, but at a fraction of the price. This forced the other companies to lower their prices and increase their speeds.
There is now decent internet for a very good price (We pay about €20 a month for up to 100mb.)

Then came fibre optic and the promise of ever greated speeds. The big corporations didn't change much as what they provided was still cheap and profitable.
This week, Free announced it would offer its customers up to 1gb download speeds. And how much will their customers' bills be increasing? They won't. We're suddenly getting up to 5 times quicker speeds with no increase in price. How awesome is that. 1gb for about €40 a month.
Last year in Canada, we were paying $120 (!!) for 5mb internet and a 120GB download cap...


I'm saying all of this because the US and Canada are still in the few companies monopoly phase, and seem to be on the verge (with Google) of doing what Free did in France. Once cheap fibre-optic internet becomes the norm and more choice is on offer, you folk are going to love it.

TL;DR - What's happening in the US with Google Fibre happened a few years ago in France. It changed the face of the internet, with Free now offering an upgrade to 1Gb internet at no extra cost.


So how would you rate your provider? Are you being left by the wayside by money-grabbing corporations, or is your provider living up to your wildest dreams?

I'll give my up-to speeds and prices in USD

France - $26/month for up to 100mb. No caps.
UK - $24/month for up to 50mb. No caps, some throttling in the evenings.
Canada (last year) - $120/month up to 20mb. 120GB cap, no throttling.

[Dazz]

Here in the UK, we're with Virgin Media. It seems the UK suffers with internet reliability, which is bizarre as we are considered a highly important country in terms of business. I'm currently on 120mbit, for around £50 a month - which, when you think about it, is ridiculous. My upload speed barely hits 1/10th of the speeds it is supposed to on this sort of connection - roughly hitting 10mbit.

The UK has mediocre coverage, for a high price, for a small island, which has unstable connections every day. It's completely illogical.

I can't wait for the day one company ups and does gigabit for a fair price. Everyone will jump to them.

[SERIOUSLY THOUGH*]

^ Yeah, we're with Orange broadband (through some joing deal with my sister's mobile). And it's decent enough, but only generally about 1/5th of the advertised up-to rate.

They also seem to have a thing against downloading (and even streaming). In the past, whenever I used to download or stream, the internet would drop unless I was connected by ethernet. I'd stop downloading and *poof*, the internet would return. It didn't do it when I was last in the UK, but there was some throttling in the evening, making streaming impossible.

I heard good things about Virgin fibre-optic at the beginning. Perhaps they weren't able to cope with the huge influx of customers and the network is saturated ?

Nothing will beat the 1p-a-minute dial-up connections from the past though. Freeserve dial-up.

[Combat Lobster]

I can't really choose my ISP as it's apart of my apartment's rent. It's fairly reliable for anything internet-related, but my main gripe is that I have a tough time watching livestreams. (But than again it could be Twitch's fault.) The service is called Elauwit Networks I believe.

[Psychospacecow]

Got AT@T here, we pay for 15mb download speed and get about 2, if the internet works. My net is currently down at home minus the wifi.

[JiraiyaSennin]

I have TWC (Time Warner Cable) for internet and cable and I think it's probably the best out of all the IPs in California. I have never had internet problems with them and videos/livestreams always run smoothly. So overall they are great.

[CosmykTheDolfyn]

Only ONE internet provider is available where I live, Frontier (it's run through Verizon and is their rural area service). Internet is, on average, a blazing 1.1 Mbps download speed, and .2 Mbps upload. They claim, however, the slowest they ever give customers is 3.5 Mbps...
Liars.
Edit: And that's around $45 a month. Like I said, ONLY service available, so I'll take it.

[Zaliphone]

I have AT&T and I'm satisfied. Very good speeds, we were upgraded for free a while ago and now have about 25Mbps down and 3Mbps up. I'm not sure how much it is per month, though, I know it's not too terribly high. And there is no cap on downloading.

I do hope that Google Fiber changes the game and makes it so other ISPs will remove caps, increase speeds, and lower prices all around.

[retrolinkx]

I was using 2003 type internet for 10 years, until I upgraded in August to a new provider. Both by BT.

There was a huge difference in internet speed in everything. It used to take days to download PSN titles, now it took minutes.

It was glorious.

[Mass Distraction]

Oh, I remember the time when my 512kb internet connection was the shit. Then it became just shit. It took forever to load a video that was 2 minutes long. I don't even remember what my provider back then was. From that it went to DNA's 1mb connection which, again, was the shit. Sometime a year or two ago I realized that I'm still using that old thing and that literally everyone had a better connection for the same price.

Now I've got a 24mb connection from Sonera which is like 36€ or something (the same as my old 1mb was). Or, well, I'm paying 54€ but that also includes the shittiest television provider I've ever had and a mobile internet I don't use, yet. Out of the 24mb I usually get around 10mb and the best I have gotten is 18mb. My upload speed is like 512kb. It's a total pain when uploading a video. The connection's reliable apart from the Wi-Fi (which sucks balls) and the online TV provider (which sucks even more balls). They do have the rare day when my connection speed drops to bits. Not kilobits, bits. Those are terrible times.

[SERIOUSLY THOUGH*]

Do you know what would be nice ?
An anti-monopoly law (not the board game) pursuant to which all areas must have at least two competing options, and if there's only one company, it is not allowed to charge more than $X for its basic, medium, and high-speed service.

It would be so very helpful for people who don't live in the big cities, like Cosmyk.

[Maxpphire]

Out here in Rhode Island you can either have Cox or Verizon.

We had Cox originally and that was fine until they started to throttle us after being with them for a few years. (My Roommate used to work for them.) The throttling was so bad that we couldn't even connect to the eAmuse we have for our Arcade Machines.

eAmuse- An internet service that stores scores online for music arcade games.

The arcade machine said it had access to said servers, but everytime we stuck out card in the card readers, it would throw out an error.

We changed to Verizon and have had no problems with that since.

[CosmykTheDolfyn]

I wish I could change. 40% to 60% packet loss is no excuse for internet. Half the pages I try to load, I have to re-load.

[The Antagonist]

In Romania they get 1GB per second for less than 15€. Where here in Spain for 10Mb/s you pay 40€. Spain is like a third world country for internet connection.

[SERIOUSLY THOUGH*]

Get on my level



Dat ping.

EDIT - But seriously, the internet's working fine for now. Everything loading nicely.