Broadband Pricing Across The World?

Freedom_Canadian writes "I was wondering if it would be possible to put up a world map with broadband internet pricing. The prices in Eastern Canada are ridiculous comparing to some states, around $24 US for DSL or cable. I would like to know who is getting screwed, and who are the lucky ones." What are the best and worst prices in your own area? Perhaps someone handy with graphics can collect some good data points from your comments and create such a beast.

Comments

Vancouver Area Here

[Nexzus]

Telus Basic residential DSL. 150K down, 50K up. $34.95 Canadian per month. (Plus basic phone line, $22 Cdn per month)

Here's a site

[tyrani]

http://www.broadbandreports.com/ It has prices and speed statistics from people who test their machines.

Ireland

[skaap]

Broadband is pretty new to Ireland, and is naturally quite expensive, although, where I live, in a small town, a local person has provided a cable internet service, until recently I was paying around 60euro per month for a service varying between 256k and 512k.
It's now up to 70euro a month, but my provider upgraded my link to nearly 3mbit/s.

I think i'm getting my moneys worth now.

China prices

[ThesQuid]

I pay $9/month for DSL access that sometimes gets up to 1.5Mb/sec. Have to put up with the Great Firewall of China though. Still last February, most of the sites they used to block were suddenly accessable.

Prices in Germany

['gourne]

Here in southern Germany DSL 768/128 costs about 50$ (12EUR for having it/ 30EUR for using it with a flatrate).

Cable internet is available in my area as well. Prices range from 10EUR(12$) for 64/64 to 120EUR(150$) for 4096/1024.

Re:Paying More For Choices

[Forge]

In Jamaica DSL starts at US$ 93 for 128Kbps up 256Kbps down.

As long as you have anything resembling a monopoly on any critical aspect the prices will remain at such insane levels. I.e. All the undersea cables terminate in one place and that company also owns the only landline network. In fact they only started having competition in Cellular 2 years ago

Re:Location, Location, Location

[los furtive]

Uhm, that may be a great idea in theory, but at leaset in Canada major cities are much more separated than those in the US, and yet DSL Cable are both close to 50% cheaper. We also only have 1/10th the population, so our population density is waaay lower than the US. Oh, and did I mention that the Canadian dollar has less than 4/5 the purchasing power of the US dollar? Finally, for those who might argue otherwise, broadband isn't state subsidised in Canada.

With the above taken into consideration, NOW try to explain why broadband is so damn expensive in the US?

Re:Location, Location, Location

[ergo98]

The Canadian government subsidizes broadband, making it less expensive

The Canadian government has initiatives to bring broadband out to rural areas (i.e. way up North). They don't subsidize broadband for the vast majority of Canadians (who are those living in fairly urban settings). Cogeco isn't getting a cheque from the government for my broadband.

Canadian citizens have to pay taxes to support their socialist government

Right...socialist. And of course where you live every road is a pay road, every service is a user-pay (fire call -- pay up. Need police services? Better have your chequebook!), and the government is minimalist -- anything else is socialist.

Re:Location, Location, Location

[gujo-odori]

I don't know what your experience in Japan is, but mine was as a network engineer at an ISP, and the local loop distances are really not significantly different than they are here. Moreover, those local loops have already been in the ground (or on the pole) for a long time; it's not like they have to run a new local loop to your house to install DSL. Finally, if you did have to run new local loops, even if the distance was shorter, I would expect the cost per kilometer to be higher in Japan, offsetting much or all of the distance savings.

DSL prices in Japan can often be comparable or maybe a little more than what they may be in many areas of the United States, but the big difference is the speed you get in Japan for that price. Take a look at this:

http://www.gol.com/personal/ntt_adsl_e.html

Look at the line on the bottom of the pricing chart. You can get 40 megabit down DSL (Yes, 40!) for about 4000 yen/month. The exchange rate is about 107 yen to the dollar, so that's under 40 bucks, or looked at another way: it's $1 per megabit, how fast would you like to go?

Also, notice that the ISP fee is the same regardless of speed, and the telco fee varies by only 150 yen from the price of 1.5 meg service to the price of 40 meg service. I imagine that not many people in a 40 meg service area will go for the 1.5 meg service :-)

This small price differences reflect the facts that in Japan:

1) The DSL market has actually grown competitive;

2) It doesn't really cost you, as a telco, any more to make the line go faster if it will support it. It doesn't cost you that much more as an ISP either, because even if I have a 40 mpbs down DSL line, when was the last time you saw an FTP server that would feed you at that rate?

Here in LA, I have 2 meg down business cable (no restrictions, global static IP), and I can get near wire speed from an FTP site with a big pipe.

In Japan, I had 100 megabits from my desk to our network core, with only two Cisco switches in between, yet the fastest downloads I ever saw were on the order of 8 mbps, from an FTP site that was both close (only a few hops away) and had massive bandwidth, the biggest pipes in the whole country. I expect high-speed users probably see similar performance, or maybe less, because they aren't plugged right into the network core over 100 megabit ethernet. So what good does 40 megabit DSL do you if no FTP site will serve you at more than 8 - 10 mbps, and there are very few even of those? Unless your provider runs a huge FTP mirror and it has huge bandwidth to the DSL network, you'll never realize anywhere near the potential of that pipe.

In Japan, you can also get 100 megabit fiber to the home for not too much more than I pay for my business cable. Here's a price list:

http://www.gol.com/personal/ntt_b_e.html

But again, what good does 100 megabit service do you if you can't pull at anywhere near that rate?

These highly competitive prices are despite the fact that nearly every aspect of running an ISP (or telco) in Japan is more costly than it is in the United States, and come from the fact that while it took a lot longer to get any kind of competition going in the telco market in Japan than it did here, they have at length done so. Best of all, the competition seems to be actually working as intended, whereas it has mostly failed here in the United States.

Re:Paying More For Choices

[Vaystrem]

I would like to put forward the example of Saskatchewan Canada, where I reside.

Population less of just a hair over a 1 million, square area of 651,900km. With our 2 biggest cities just over 200k population. Why does this matter?

The population density of Saskatchewan, and much of rural Canada, is very low and from what I can see it is very similar in density to rural American States.

Our telco (Sasktel) has committed to every town, with greater than 40 people in this province having access to ADSL. Several of the enlightened employees I have spoken too have commented on the deployment as well.

In addition our Telco (Sasktel - a government owned corporation 'crown corporation') also distributes Digital television via DSL - so these communities also will in the near term get access to this service as well.

But of course we must be paying an absolute fortune for this wonderful widely distributed service - right? Because we "pay for choice (even if it doesn't exist in your area)"

1.54 down / 384 up = $45.99 Canadian a month.
Which (with our current great exchange rate) would work out to about $36 American. Where our dollar traditionally resides it would work out to right around $30 American.

So even in a rural province - we have an extremely high level of access, and we don't pay through the nose for it.

And yes there are competitors so there is a free market in effect (in dense population areas) but for rural communities it takes a benevolent (i use that term with some sarcasm) organization to push access upward and outward.