Scrolled too far down before a mention of Comcast. I was in charge of a handful of locations where we needed broadband. They were geographically diverse enough that we had to go with different options. Comcast was the most expensive, and by a lot. Like 30%, and the slowest in dl/ul by a large margin. Comcast was also the second worst one to deal with. The actual worst one was the faster, slightly less expensive Spectrum. They had by far the worst service. A couple of locations had small DSL companies that were a delight to deal with and reasonably priced, but slow as balls. And then one location had a municipal fiber option that was the cheapest, fastest, and easiest to deal with by far. Like, I swear to god I could call them and talk to a real network engineer that no joke actually knew more than I did. I don't mean this to sound arrogant; I am not great with networking. I'm just saying compared to "yeah, I have that in bridge mode because I don't need router capability I'm running my own" and being answered with something like "whoa I'm going to need to get a supervisor" vs them being like "hey can you open a terminal and..." Yes, yes I can open a terminal.
I had 2Mbps (yes, bits, not bytes) until 2020. Then I moved out. Pretty sure that my parents house still only gets that same speed. And this is in fucking Germany, a pretty densely populated country.
As a Swede, I usually get well above 3 Mbit/s on 3G, and I have a 100/100 Mbit/s fiber that I often use to its full potential, and that's with a VPN on.
I really thought Germany had better infrastructure.
It depends. I grew up in the country and my parents still have to use phone hotspots for internet which works well for streaming but forget about any gaming. I live in a fairly major metropolitan city now and my internet is pretty good, although I've noticed my download speeds get throttled sometimes
It can be, but I live in a semi-rural neighborhood outside of a town that doesn't even have 100,000 people and I'm still getting 400/400 on fiber (and can get higher speeds if I want to pay for them).
In cities, Gigabit internet is abundant and only mildly expensive. Here in Phoenix I pay $60/mo for 1 Gbps down, 50 Mbps up with no bandwidth cap from Verizon. Not the best but far from "awful".
You might not have to. Look into fixed 5G internet. So long as you have a view of a tower (which you should in a major metropolitan city; I'm in suburbia and still have 3 within view), speeds and latency are as good as a wired connection. I'd look into it.
That sucks. Happens when there's no competition in your area. Verizon is $60 for 1Gbps here, no data cap, because they have to compete with Cox. Greedy bastards.
I pay $65 for 1Gb symmetrical and no cap. But I have options for ISPs. My parents in rural Washington have the option of wireless internet at 10Mbps for $70/month or HughesNet satellite for some ungodly amount with worse speed. Starlink is still not available there.