Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Good lord, $180 a month ?!! In the UK it's £62 (~87$), though it's not widely available.



It really depends on where you live. Where I live (Ohio, U.S.), 1GB down is $65/month.


Municipal ISP here in Colorado, is offering 1GB Up/Down for $50 a month.


It's one of those situations where most customers call at the end of their 1 year promotional period and pretend to threaten to cancel, gets transferred to customer retention, and resign for another year at the discount rate.


Enjoying 1Gbs symmetric for £40/month ($56) with Hyperoptic in London.

I feel for my US counterparts.


> I feel for my US counterparts.

You're comparing London to Middle of Nowhere USA. Gigabit symmetric for $80/month is available all over D.C. (More expensive than London, but incomes here are higher too.)


Yep, live in Middle of Nowhere (ish) UK...I pay £30 for 70mbps, and am very happy. I moved recently from a larger town nearby, there I paid the same price for 20mbps (and it was horrendous service, up/down all day).

I live 20 miles from a fairly large city, there is a gigabit loop there...only high rises, average speeds in the city are 70bmps (which is why I feel lucky, I am right next to an exchange).

The fibre rollout was completely botched in the UK. BT (the former monopoly) was investing in TV and mobile, the govt has caught up with them now (and agreed to CPI+5% rate increases) but all through the 2010s, the only fibre investment was a startup that did a lot but was obviously limited by capital (CityFibre, just acquired by Goldman Sachs...so that should go well). The sector was also gunshy after the fallout from the late 90s: a big company invested heavily in fast internet and tried to overlay BT's network, it got taken to the woodshed.

The only place with consistently fast speeds over 100mbps is a small town/city on the East coast called Hull, due to a quirk of history they are the only place that is outside the BT monopoly (the monopoly there was run by KCom) so they got investment, and pretty much nowhere else did.

I am aware of the issues in the US but the UK is not a good example. As said above, telecoms policy through the whole of the 2010s was seriously mismanaged. We will catch up but we aren't a good example (most of the UK population is densely packed into England, which is the size of Alabama but with over 10x the population...even Scotland, which is roughly the size and population density of Alabama, has 75% of the population in 5% of the land...it shouldn't be hard).


Not even London as a whole either, I think Hyperoptic mostly only serves high-rise flats with the density to make the install costs justifiable.


Some of my London friends are using this. Crazy good value and the CS is excellent.

We've just moved from 20/2 Talktalk to 200/20 with Virgin for the same price (£30/month). Pretty sure you can get Hyperoptic a couple of streets away, but openreach hasn't got to us yet (hence Virgin).

With all the home Zoom calls, TalkTalk was killing me. In 2021 it was frustratingly slow.


Hyperoptic cover an absolutely tiny part of the country though. For most people they are stuck with BT VDSL if they're lucky, ADSL if they are less.


I'm enjoying 900Mb symmetric from G-network for 48GBP / month. It's been pretty good so far although I wonder if it'll get slow as more people join.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: