Quote:
Originally Posted by grumpy3b
Until my selling my home recently, while I live in what is called a small town in the US, about 25k people, we at least can have up to 7.1/768 service and they could sell some people up to 12Mbps service but won't due to the very real physical limitations you outline.
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I've been very lucky with my broadband ISP. I live in a rural unincorporated area, and the nearest "town" where my ISP's office is located is only slightly less rural and has a population of less than 1,000. When I first got cable internet 8 years ago the top offered speed was 3 mb/s. Later, they changed that to 5 mb/s for the same price, then to 8 mb/s. Then they started offering higher priced speeds of 16 mb/s and 25 mb/s. I went up to 25 mb/s for a year or two, but then decided to drop back down to 8 mb/s to save money-- and a few days after I dropped back to 8 mb/s, they did another free upgrade so that that tier now gets 12 mb/s-- the top speed offered is now 60 mb/s. I've never had my transfer speed drop below the rated capacity I was paying for-- when I paid for 25 mb/s, I always had 25 mb/s. A while back, the provider (Charter) claimed that they were going to implement a bandwidth cap of 100 GB a month, but I don't think they have ever enforced it.
Myself, I firmly believe that if I pay for a 25 mb/s connection, then I should be allowed to, if I so wished, download at 25 mb/s 24 hours a day, every day, or around 1.7 TB a week. I don't do anything at least an order of magnitude close to that-- but when I had a dial-up modem, I
did have it downloading 24/7, only disconnecting when there was a dropped carrier (with individual connections lasting for weeks.)