It's a HUGE scam from taxapayer money. My guess is over 100 BILLION has been paid-out with very little improvement nation-wide.
I live in a market where there are several providers around me for high'ish bandwidth (though only a few areas have gig service), but in my subdivision there is only 1 provider (for anything over 15 megabit) - and they can and will *jack-up prices without warning and you can't do anything about it other than say "cancel service" and then "fight" for a more reasonable price. Additionally, no fiber. My subdivision is that sort of pissing-pond problem without any regulation.
*we went from $60 a month 100 megabit down 10 up to being charged for overage fees totaling like $150 because we'd been "switched" from unlimited without our knowledge. Then we hit the "cancel service" run-around and finally spoke to a state-side re-mediator and now it's the same $60 for 350 megabit down and 40 up unlimited (..though even then we had to carefully state that we had our own modem or they would have tacked-on another $10 a month). Of course meanwhile that very same service provider (Optimum) is offering fiber near us (but not in our subdivision) for $50 a month with a $200 prepaid Visa card and a 1 year term OR 200 megabit for $30 AND the $200 Visa card which is available to us BUT for New Customers ONLY, which we can never be because they are the only viable service provider (unless we go without internet for 6 months).
Price-wise I'm fairly happy with where we are now, but it was a pain in the @ss to get to that point, and it likely will be again with their price-hike shenanigans. (..and for TV we had DirecTV before then with exactly the same problems, and dumped them for streaming with Sling Blue - which is what caused the higher use for that month.)
Moreover the ISP definitely throttles certain websites like Youtube. (Though so far our other (Sling, IMDB, Pluto, Xumo, etc.) streaming for TV's hasn't been that bad.) At some point though I might have to setup my own private "VPN" through something like Linode with providers near my City area.
-yeah, it's a sore spot for me! Sorry about the off-topic rant. ops:
I live in a market where there are several providers around me for high'ish bandwidth (though only a few areas have gig service), but in my subdivision there is only 1 provider (for anything over 15 megabit) - and they can and will *jack-up prices without warning and you can't do anything about it other than say "cancel service" and then "fight" for a more reasonable price. Additionally, no fiber. My subdivision is that sort of pissing-pond problem without any regulation.
*we went from $60 a month 100 megabit down 10 up to being charged for overage fees totaling like $150 because we'd been "switched" from unlimited without our knowledge. Then we hit the "cancel service" run-around and finally spoke to a state-side re-mediator and now it's the same $60 for 350 megabit down and 40 up unlimited (..though even then we had to carefully state that we had our own modem or they would have tacked-on another $10 a month). Of course meanwhile that very same service provider (Optimum) is offering fiber near us (but not in our subdivision) for $50 a month with a $200 prepaid Visa card and a 1 year term OR 200 megabit for $30 AND the $200 Visa card which is available to us BUT for New Customers ONLY, which we can never be because they are the only viable service provider (unless we go without internet for 6 months).
Price-wise I'm fairly happy with where we are now, but it was a pain in the @ss to get to that point, and it likely will be again with their price-hike shenanigans. (..and for TV we had DirecTV before then with exactly the same problems, and dumped them for streaming with Sling Blue - which is what caused the higher use for that month.)
Moreover the ISP definitely throttles certain websites like Youtube. (Though so far our other (Sling, IMDB, Pluto, Xumo, etc.) streaming for TV's hasn't been that bad.) At some point though I might have to setup my own private "VPN" through something like Linode with providers near my City area.
-yeah, it's a sore spot for me! Sorry about the off-topic rant. ops:
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