this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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We just don't get those kinds of prices here for a couple reasons. America is just so big, we largely live in single family homes, finally every company has to build its own infrastructure. Connecting all those individual houses is expensive. So either companies won't or if they do the cost of the Internet access is expensive too.
I'm pretty sure it's not because the country is big. It's because couple of companies have effective monopoly and there's no competition. A lot of municipal fibre projects got killed by lobbying and lawsuits and even big companies like Google struggle to enter the market because existing laws protect the monopoly. The government could provide the central infrastructure like it does in Europe but it's corrupt and not really interested in building infrastructure any more.
The last mile is a really expensive. Even a well intentioned company that wants to keep it's prices low has difficulty building that last mile out. There just aren't enough Americans who actually want government infrastructure like that. If enough people wanted them I firmly believe it would happen.
The last mile is not that expensive. Where I live you there's provider offering fast internet to rural, sparsely populated areas and it's not much more expensive than fibre I get in my apartment. I will be more expensive to connect a house like that definitely not thousands of dollars like they try to charge people in USA. In USA it would also be cheaper if the monopoly would not block smaller companies from rolling out the service. There's a lot of stories about neighbours joining together and building the last mile themselves at fraction of the cost Comcast wanted to charge them.
Monopolies don't exist every place. There are several companies in my area offering high speed Internet. One is in suburbs all around me but not in mine. They also have the cheapest costs. I called them asking when they might be expecting to my suburb and they said that my town (pop 60,000) will be one of the last because of how difficult it'll be to get to every house. A different company moved in pay year and they cost more than the first one. State governments shouldn't be allowed to block municipal Internet.
I think I read somewhere that the US government gave some grants/subsidies to ISPs to build their fiber network? Surely this should translate to cheaper price?
Unfortunately that's not how it works. That works as an incentive to build not as a mechanism to bring down prices. For gigabit access in most markets that'll cost at least $50 more likely closer to $100 a month. I pay $60
It should work to bring down prices because the network would be paid for and so there's less of a need to make up for costs. Doesn't matter anyway, since the ISPs just pocketed the money and paid it out in bonuses rather than build what was promised.
Should yes but the federal government doesn't make conditions for the funds and if they do it's just ignore without consequences.