Hacker Neue

Preferences
pavelevst parent
In Russia we get 500-1000mbps (for real) for about 5-10$ monthly, every home has few ISP options with free installation
DiscourseFan
Labor costs are lower. The US has the highest cost of labor in the world for many jobs that would be relatively inexpensive elsewhere.
Spooky23
Russia probably has state owned poles.

In most US places, utility companies own the poles and it’s ridiculously expensive to lease space. Urban areas with competitive ISPs usually have government owned poles or leases for streetlight arbs that allow them to string fiber.

sidewndr46
That's a weird analysis of US policy. Very few places in the US have privately owned poles. What most places have is private poles on public right of way. It's a worst of both worlds scenario. Where somehow public infrastructure is used to exclusively further private interests.
Spooky23
Sounds like they own the poles bro.
pavelevst OP
Average salary nowadays is 800-1000$/mnt (after 30-40% taxes), I would expect internet price in US to be proportional to their labor costs
DiscourseFan
Yes the average salary of an internet installation technician is about $25 an hour or about a 1000 a week before taxes. Although, the people doing regular installs and the people who are in charge of planning and building out networks are different and often the latter are paid far more.
skyyler
Why is labour so expensive in the US? Is it because of healthcare costs being passed to employers?
hash872
Fun fact, the US has always had some of the highest wages in the world- even dating back to colonial times before 1776. Adam Smith did a detailed accounting of them, going occupation-by-occupation and noting that American colonist wages were higher than on the British mainland. (I'm excited because I literally just read this last night. I would link if I could to the specific pages in my book).

I believe the standard explanation is that most of the colonists were British (already a high-wage country at the time), and you really had to pay skilled labor to get them to leave & settle on a new continent. Plus labor mobility between the proto-state governments of the time (Virginia, Massachusetts, etc.)

jrib
what book?
hash872
Perfecting Parliament, by Roger Congleton. It's a history of the global move towards parliamentary systems. Obviously not primarily an economics book, but he does touch on some econ themes- here Congleton quoted Adam Smith on American colonial wages
dan-robertson
Mostly because most people have lots of options for employment and they typically don’t take the low options. In a place with nationalised healthcare you would still be paying for it through taxes paid by the labourer but I guess the system would be a bit more progressive than in the US so lower-skill labour would demand a smaller premium for healthcare. Though I think there’s probably more than just labour costs in the US. Eg maybe it is expensive to get the right permits to install fibre optic cables.
sneak
My home in Las Vegas is 2000Mbps down and 100Mbps up, and it's $200/month. $50/month of that is an add-on for "unlimited" usage, but Cox still writes me letters and threatens to cancel my service if I upload more than 2-3TB in a calendar month, despite having paid well over $3000 in "unlimited" add-on upcharges.

Internet pricing is a scam in the USA.

martinald
I assume you are on DOCSIS coax internet? The problem is upstream on DOCSIS is (very) constrained and if you hammer it causes huge problems for everyone on the segment (TCP ACKs start getting lost/slow, everyones ping rises massively and huge packetloss starts occurring).

Obviously no excuse to claim it is unlimited, but if the major US cable companies speeded up moving to true FTTH it would really save them a lot of trouble in the long run.

sneak
There’s no need for them to move to FTTH; 99.9% of homes don’t need more than 10-20Mbps upstream.

I was on 1000/40 for most of my history with them ($100+$50) now I have 2000/100 ($150+$50). I would be fine with 40Mbps upstream unlimited; the issue is not the throttling but the threats resulting from bait-and-switch.

icedchai
The problem with cable internet is that the shared medium (coax segment) has relatively little upstream bandwidth, shared by 100's of users. FTTH has much more bandwidth and a smaller amount of homes sharing it. Typically there is a passive splitter / fiber distribution for 8 to 32 homes, at least an order of magnitude better than cable.

I switched to fiber a few years back. But at one point during covid, my cable modem upstream was getting less than a megabit (I was paying for 500/30.)

martinald
Correct, and in reality it's likely to be 100-1000x the capacity. Probably say 16 users on average on a PON segment, with XGS-PON having 10gigabit/sec symmetrical.

Compare that to docsis 3.1 - maybe 200mbit/sec between hundreds of users.

DOCSIS 4.0 is better but just basically brings the split much closer to the home, in which case you'd probably be better off finishing the job with FTTH instead of having thousands of expensive active DOCSIS terminals every few hundred metres.

Also, you can easily upgrade capacity on FTTH, just add a new OLT and you can run that side by side with the old one while you upgrade everyone's ONTs.

martinald
I disagree - video conferencing and screensharing with a couple of calls at once will quickly eat up 10-20mbit/sec. 50-100mbit/sec I would agree is enough.

Regardless you're missing the point. DOCSIS has maybe 100-200mbit/sec of upstream shared between hundreds of homes - this will vary depending on config, and keep in mind a lot of that will be used for TCP ACKs from the downstream. So you probably have say 50-100mbit/sec "real" upstream available, or less than 1mbit/sec per subscriber.

If you hammered 40mbit/sec hard you are using nearly the entire 'usable' upstream of your entire cable modem segment.

DOCSIS is just massively inferior to FTTH for this reason.

alostpuppy
I’m in Vegas. It’s the first time I’ve actually had meaningful ISP competition and incredibly I can get fiber for 50 a month without caps. (Using quantum)
VTimofeenko
Russian public infrastructure is vastly different compared to the US though. It's probably much easier to run Internet to 10 apartment homes housing 1000 people than to 300 single family houses with the same amount of people.
pavelevst OP
I was living in Indonesia, where most of people lives in individual houses, internet installation is free or ~20$, but monthly is 20-50$ for fiber 100mbps. In house areas they have noodles of cables on the poles but it works
VTimofeenko
Assuming $ still denotes US currency, that looks fairly expensive relative the average salary.

I remember paying about 10$ for a proper gigabit in Russia. Probably a perk of living right next to an exchange point.

philjohn
It is expensive.

I'm paying £40 a month for symmetric gigabit to my home, which is a house, in a suburb full of other houses, with no apartment blocks in sight.

kubb
I'm guessing in cities.
pavelevst OP
Yes small city in central (European) part. Mobile unlimited 4g is about 8$ but some operators has FUP 200gb monthly, with 4g modem connected to the router and special antenna in the roof will work well outside cities. About remote areas I don’t know
TiredOfLife
That's what happens when you invade a country to steal resources and equipment.
bufferoverflow
In Russia you get pseudo-internet without Youtube, Instagram, X, Discord, The Internet Archive, many news sites.
pavelevst OP
Abit inconsistent you’ll need to use VPN. (Don’t we have to use it in liberal countries too if open torrents) It’s just some resources are blocked, it isn’t as bad as in China or Iran. Previously internet was same cheap but not so restricted
timewizard
How many ISP options do you have at your location?

Typically the US only has one. Two if you are exceedingly lucky.

krupan
I believe that in Russia you wrestle bears and that the only liquid anyone drinks is vodka, but this I simply cannot believe :)

This item has no comments currently.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Story Lists

j
Next story
k
Previous story
Shift+j
Last story
Shift+k
First story
o Enter
Go to story URL
c
Go to comments
u
Go to author

Navigation

Shift+t
Go to top stories
Shift+n
Go to new stories
Shift+b
Go to best stories
Shift+a
Go to Ask HN
Shift+s
Go to Show HN

Miscellaneous

?
Show this modal