When New York’s law requiring $15 or $20 broadband plans for people with low incomes took effect last week, Optimum customer William O’Brien tried to sign up for the cheap Internet service. Since O’Brien is in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), he qualifies for one of the affordable plans that Internet service providers must offer New Yorkers who meet income eligibility requirements.
O’Brien has been paying Optimum $111.20 a month for broadband—$89.99 for the broadband service, $14 in equipment rental fees, a $6 “Network Enhancement Fee,” and $1.21 in tax. He was due for a big discount under the New York Affordable Broadband Act (ABA), which says that any ISP with over 20,000 customers must offer either a $15 plan with download speeds of at least 25Mbps or a $20 plan with at least 200Mbps speeds, and that the price must include “any recurring taxes and fees such as recurring rental fees for service provider equipment required to obtain broadband service and usage fees.”
Despite qualifying for a low-income plan under the law’s criteria, O’Brien’s request was denied by Optimum. He reached out to Ars, just like many other people who have read our articles about bad telecom customer service. Usually, these problems are fixed quickly after we reach out to an Internet provider’s public relations department on the customer’s behalf.
WHAT
I pay 50 euros for my internet, and that’s already in one of the most expensive countries for internet in Europe.
Edit to add: this is for 400Mbps symmetrical fibre. Gigabit connections here are usually around 65-70 euros I think.
But wait, what if I told you it was also really shitty service?
I’m paying $120/mo CAD (~83USD) for a ‘1.5 gigabit’ fiber connection that actually tests at ~160mbps.
That’s been pretty consistent in speed+price for 5ish years.
Up until recently, I was paying $100 for a 150mbps connection. They finally got fiber to our area though with a different ISP, so we ditched the old one and got a new 1000mbps connection for $90. Of course, it actually only gives us about 940mbps in tests, but I’ll take it. Especially since this is the US and choice in ISPs isn’t really a thing for most people.
1000 mbps is the theoretical limit of the line. You will typically lose a little bit for things like TCP overhead.
Damn, so I get pretty much the max of what it’s capable of. So far, it’s been pretty reliable too, with the router only reporting downtime for three minutes during the night one time.
Now of course, most things don’t let you download from their servers with that kind of speed, but torrents are super speedy.
85 for 400/10 here. It’s pretty awful. Guess down for several hours a week as well.
I was paying $140/mo for 300 down, 8 up that was plagued with packetloss and never came close to the advertised speed, until someone bought their own cherry pickers and started stripping the poles for copper in my area. 🤣
I learned this from the tech who installed my $65/month symmetrical gigabit fiber, after waiting for more than 7 years for any better ISP to be available where I live.