This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Unfortunately the next administration will likely agree with the ISPs on this. To an extent T-Mobile and Verizon 5G home internet has genuinely shaken up the industry. As long as low latency isn't a requirement of yours they're quite good. For me they offer higher upload speeds than my local ISP monopoly with similar download speeds.
We can switch ISP???
No. You're welcome.
Sure... You probably have the option of a wireless ISP that provides 1/10 the speed for 5x the cost.
In reality... no.
I used to live in an apartment that had an exclusivity deal with Xfinity/Comcast. We could only get Xfinity services. At my current house I do actually have a choice: Xfinity (cable or fiber), AT&T Fiber, or a local ISP (Sonic) that's much better.
For most normal people in most normal places: yes, you can.
Well, that is true for me in Canada with Teksavvy.
Fuck that shit. I switched to Starlink while flipping them off. Going back? Not even once
The same issue is true with starlink though. So many in rural areas, and even some not-so-rural areas, have starlink as their only real option now. I love what starlink has done for rural internet access, as someone who had dial up (yes, not even DSL) up until 2018 when I moved. However, it's still a monopoly, and that's concerning. Starlink can essentially charge whatever they want for their service and have a market for their product. That's sorta scary to me.
I literally couldn't care less when it is actually cheaper and infinitely better than any option we have here.
Who knows, maybe the other companies will think on the money they lose not being useful to customers and provide a better product, but for now, up to the point that is convenient to me as a customer, Starlink is fucking awesome 😎
For me, it's the price, and effort involved with researching cheaper/better providers. Maybe once a year I'll look at competitors. If ISP raise price, that's when I more seriously look at competitors.
For me its that even if I pay for 1gb/down, it drops to around 25mb down. That was after I switched off spectrum, which I had 200 down, and would fall to 5mb/s down, and I would start to lose VoIP calls while using any amount of remote software. Would happen just about daily and one of the main times it would happen was around noon. Now I could have switched to a business line to see if I could get more guaranteed stable bandwidth, but honestly it's just bull shit that the infrastructure is that bad in the first place. I would like the FCC to mandate instead of max up/down speeds possible, that minimum up/down speeds (outside of outages, which outage time should be reported as well) as what is advertised. So instead of 1Gb/down for just $69.99/month, we see 50mb/s down minimum for $69.99/ month, and all times their infrastructure does not meet their advertized rate which you are paying for, is moved to $0. So you bill decreases based upon outages.
Honestly, I can't even complain about my cable ISP. It's super stable. I have multiple game consoles, streaming devices in every room, and connected phones and/or tablets for every member of the family. And I'm in a VERY rural part of PA. Service Electric Cablevision, first cable company in the US. It's not WY level rural, but seriously. I don't know how much more I should expect. I can count on one hand with fingers left over if I wanted to count the number of times i had to call for tech support over the last 10 years.
I mean yeah, Virgin has been pretty solid in that regard for the 20 years I've used them, and their service has been solid too.
I'd be wary of switching to another company that doesn't have such a good proven track record, though due to prices I'm considering swapping to Brsk for a bit to see how they hold up, given that they have symmetric gigabit fibre to the house with static IP for a very nice low price.
