> One peculiar thing from the UK: Internet providers don’t truly offer gigabit internet. They have a range of deals like 30 Mbps – 75 Mbps – 150 Mbps – 300 Mbps – 500 Mbps – 900 Mbps, each one costing a few more pounds per month than the last. This makes the UK simultaneously one of the cheapest and one of the most expensive countries to get Internet.

Andrews and Arnold[0] offer gigabit, but I'm not surprised the author hasn't heard of them; they never advertise.

[0] https://www.aa.net.uk/

This is due to advertising standards. They are required to advertise "average speed", although how this is actually calculated is nebulous.

A&A not advertising can just say what the link speeds actually are on the product pages.

Other ISP's could do this too, but it would cause confusion having one figure on the advert and one figure on the product pages, and they might get in trouble if they link to the product pages in the adverts.

As others have said, Fibre is a postcode lottery.

A&A is expensive for me. 1Gbps down and 115Mb/s up with a 1TB/mo quota for £75/mo. I get similar speeds (with no download limit) from BT for £34.99/mo.

Community Fibre is £63/mo for symmetric 5Gbps and "unlimited data".

I'm locked into a contract with BT for another year but I don't have any real need for anything faster than 500Mbps right now.

I'm focusing on making my homelab network 10GbE to cover the day that I do manage to get >1Gbps broadband.

It's not true either. Openreach offer a 1.6gbit/sec product now, which ISPs can resell.

I don't understand why he says it's the most expensive places to get internet. You can get 900mbit (really 1gig pre overheads) for ~£30/month on openreach infrastructure which is not the cheapest in the world but it certainly isn't the most expensive.

And if you're covered by an altnet (who build their own infrastructure instead of reselling openreach) like cityfibre, community fibre or netomnia you'll get far faster speeds for even less money.

A lot of these providers do rent the poles and ducts off openreach, but then lay their own fibre over it

It's not just A&A either. I know I'm lucky as I live in an area that's had a relatively new CityFibre XGS-PON install, but I've got 2300Mbps symmetrical and 5000Mbps is coming Q1 this year.

Virgin Media also do Gigabit plus speeds and you can upgrade to symmetrical (they don't seem to advertise this though). That's definitely a household name.

I used to live in the UK and thought double-digit broadband was pretty good, actually.

Now I live in a slightly remote corner of Europe and I had 6Gbps fiber installed yesterday, for €15/month. (Nominally 10Gbps, measures as 6, which is... pretty good, actually.)