From your post, it seems the European internet and mobile market is much more competitive than the US one. And yet much more regulated. It seems that’s two markets where EU regulations have actually created both enough competition (still not a lot of providers, 3, 4 everywhere) and constraints on the licensees to give us cheap very high speed fiber and painless mobile switch (number portability). Is your city dense? It’s so weird that the center would be left out of fiber when generally that’s where carriers prefer to lay it first.

>while those living in the heart of downtown usually only have cable internet at best

If you're in the U.S. probably exclusive provider revenue share agreements with apartment buildings. The ISP gets exclusive access to the building and the building owner gets a % of ISP revenue.

Anecdotally, that rev share can be tens of thousands a year.

Sounds more like Stockholm syndrome. I used to be ok with comcast even with their incessant increasing of rates that i'd have to negotiate and the terrible service. Finally had enough, switched to AT&T fiber. omg. the difference is night and day. No more caps, no more random outages. Lower pings, half the price and no price increase so far. I don't know why anybody keeps it tbh

While I hate it, I agree with you. My in laws are my non-tech bellwether.

They use Comcast, and love it. It's zero maintenance, comes bundled with their cable, and provides in person customer support for almost any problem at all at no cost.

They're paying more than they should for slow speeds. But they don't care about that. They don't know technology, and their connection plays YouTube and Facebook.

> But we also have AT&T

That might be part of it. When I first moved in, Comcast was the only ISP available. Then the city got municipal fibre. Suddenly, comcast decided to lower prices, and increase speeds. I will say that it was still a pain to cancel my subscription when I switched to the new setvice, though.

The underlying technology not the company itself is good enough most people don’t really complain once everything is set up. But for people moving to or from different areas Comcast really comes off much worse than most ISPs.

You can notice differences in web browsing above and beyond what the highly gamed “speed tests” suggest. Wait times for a technician are somewhat region dependent, but it’s never great etc. Total prices are high even when they have some competition and get silly when they’re a monopoly.

My parents are hitting and exceeding their 1.2TiB data allotment streaming TV shows. I'm considering setting them up with T-Mobile home internet.

Data caps alone are extremely anti consumer friendly. It's very difficult for non technical folks to understand how much they're consuming. Especially given the stark different between 1080p and 4k which might not even be obvious depending on their TV and streaming service.

Bingo. You really need to take HN thoughts (or really any nerd haven) with a grain of salt when it comes to _anything_ tech. Lots of strong (often informed) opinions that grounded in a reality that does not exist for most people.

There is competition in my area and it is way faster, and I did switch

But the competition isn't great either, so I get why people don't.

The modem/router the other company uses (can't use my own modem) is terrible and their support had no idea what I was talking about when I pointed to the DHCP table full of random shit that it wasn't freeing up, and logs full of DNS errors. And the wifi access points they provided were terrible too (free, but terrible). Eventually I worked around that by just adding my own router in the mix with a (internal 192.168) static IP, cut their DNS out of my router's list of DNS, and used my own wifi access points (which I had from Comcast days).

After my third support call I got a tech who provided instructions on putting their router/modem combo into bridge mode, but I'm hesitant to actually go through with that because I have no confidence their support can unwind me if anything goes wrong.

Like sibling points out, Comcast does offer faster download speed due to the competition. Still not as fast, but w/e.

The service you receive is made better just by the presence of competition.