Quote:
Originally Posted by ardeegee
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.
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I live in a rural area, and my max speed is 4Mb/s. I don't have a lot of choice of provider. The phone cable is owned by the Dutch Telecom (same system as what Harry described). But, unlike in Britain, about 90% of the homes here could take cable. I decided not to, I like having my tv from one provider and my internet from a second, so that when one drops, I still have the other...
There are sounds right now, that the rural areas really need to upgrade from copper to glass. The main lines all are already glass, but the last parts are still copper.
And 12km north of me, there's an internet backbone... (one of the glassfiber cables that connects the US to Europe hits land there...)
And we still only have 4Mb/s (but no data cap!)