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Sometimes, living in Sweden isn't all that bad. At home I have a 10Mbps (duplex) broadband connection without upper limits on traffic and it's "only" about ~$40 USD a month through Bredbandsbolaget.

So, all that talk about ISP's "losing money" on people wanting higher bandwidth up and downstreams is fud. If the ISP in question has the proper infrastructure then it's all about pricing and packaging the different services/products correctly.

Heck, Bredbandsbolaget allows me to instantly upgrade my 10Mbps to 100Mbs down and 10Mbps upstream although that service is rather pricy and the 10Mbps I have today will suffice for some time.

DSL; good riddance.

And Bredbandsbolaget in Sweden is selling 100 Mbps for SEK 595 (roughly US$85.32).

Here's their page. (sorry, just in Swedish)

Bostream in Sweden. See here, if you can read Swedish, well, you can probably make sense of it either way.

Universities very often do provide highspeed connections. In Norway there are at least one. Though they only provide 10Mbit in Norway, I believe the same company offers 100Mbit in Sweden.

And when you start doing enough transfers it's most certainly is the seeking and writing times for your HD which limits the actual speeds, not the network-connection. At least that's my experience.

Also the machine I dumped at my studyroom was the heap of old remains after upgrading my home pc to a p4. So I really like my software as native as possible for my university computer.

Might check it out though.

Is there anyone outside the US that gets these kinds of letters from their providers???

Scandinavia is notorious for having cheap, high-bandwidth connections. Sweden in particular I believe.

Here, if you're lucky, you pay about 40 USD for a 10mbit ethernet connection without bandwidth limitations. Until recently the cost was less than $30 even. They're about to offer 100mbits at the same cost but with a monthly gigabit allowance I believe.

Cable exists and is doing better lately, but DSL is all over the place and mostly you get the bandwidth you pay for. Not everywhere with every provider, but you *can* get it if you're not too far out in the woods.

DSL is mostly around the same price. 2.5mbit downsteam and 768kbit up is about average. Although in most of the major cites you can get VDSL starting at 8mbit/1mbit for us unfortunates,and up to 26mbit/26mbit if you're pretty much next to the switching station.

You can get much cheaper connections with much less bandwidth...but I haven't really checked them out :)

Sweden, for some very strage reason, has three providers offering symmetrical, 10 Mbps or bigger connections for less than 65 USD a month. I'm not a swede, and don't have information in English, but you should be able to decipher what matters here. The yellow box below the headline has the speeds and prices. One Swedish krona is roughly 13.5 US cents, prices are per month and anslutningsavgift is the one-time hookup fee.

As you can see in the Aftonbladet article, Telia has just entered the fray. They were literally forced to do so, by competition from Bredbandsbolaget and Bostream.

Bredbandsbolaget, apparently not content with losing their edge (their connections are generally considered better than Bostream's, dispite the bandwidth advertised), are preparing to roll out a 100 Mbps service next year, with a 300GB/mo traffic limit, rumored to cost in the neighbourhood of 120 USD/mo; I wonder how people will survive such terribly restrictive limits, heh.

In most urban scenarios, there isn't any divide and conquer going on. Having many providers competing in the same areas has its advantages.

I've never even been to Sweden, but happen to know a lot of Swedish netizens. Most of those are hard-core gamers, the most demanding users you'll find; anything short of 1MB/sec downloads and 10ms latency domestically, and they'll be screaming.

While this is a very good offer, it doesn't seem that extraordinary. Bredbandsbolaget in Sweden has offered 10 MBit/s ethernet for a long time with a present price of around $36 per month. That's more expensive than the offer this story mentions, but not all that much. I'm one of their many happy customers. (No, I'm not getting paid to say this.)

I don't think there is anything special about Sweden, it's just that several companies got the idea that they should market Ethernet to the home, and it turns out it's not that much more expensive than DSL or cable. I'm surprised that no corporations in other countries have attempted to do the same.

This is a link to my ISP
The site is available in the nordic languages and, of course English.

Read, envy, and take to the streets to demand this bandwidth for the masses.
In _all_ countries.
If you haven't experienced a 10Mb/s line to your home, you probably have no idea what the potential uses of the internet are. A fat pipe makes a lot of cool things possible.
Some of them are legal, others should probably be.

(I realize that food, water and shelter is more important, but you get the idea.)