Article: Why is European broadband faster and cheaper? Blame the government

You can view the page at http://filesharingtalk.com/content/1...the-government

I pay 30 Euros a month for unlimited DSL 24 Mb/s + phone +TV (never used it coz i dl everything i need). My ISP is Free. I live in France

Very good article. The fact is, most of us are unhappy with our (1, or 2) "choices". We know we are paying way too much, and would jump to another provider in a heartbeat given more options.

I pay 41€, for a fiber optics connection. Free phonecalls for over 30 countries worldwide plus unlimited ones for my country's landlines, 100 TV channels and 40/4 Mbits unmetered and unshaped internet connection. And they still offered a usb 3G modem with 500mb traffic per month for free.

Cable here, costs around 20 euro per month. No additional perks, but you can tip the cable guy to prevent him from installing the filter and thus have free TV. :P

There are other different providers - Telecentro gives you Internet plus TV plus Internet phoning, and PhoneVision has pretty cheap optical fiber plans.

I have 3Mbit down and 0.2 up (improves during night time). Unmetered and unshaped too, although they used to shape P2P traffic long ago. As for the service itself, it's okay. Probably the least bad one you can find in my area.

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(Bonus: Their customer service people are trained geeks who won't repeatedly insist that you reboot your computer and modem before moving on to help solve the problem.)

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I once read on a local forum about how one of the support monkeys claimed "nvCplDaemon" was spyware preventing the connection from working correctly. I don't think I'm going to forget that. :lol:

I was pretty surprised when I found out many ISPs in the US, a first-world country, have bandwidth caps - there's no provider doing that where I live.

i want to move back to europe...

It's funny how Americans bitch and moan about their 200GB caps while we're getting railed up the ass in Canada.

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Originally Posted by ca_aok

It's funny how Americans bitch and moan about their 200GB caps while we're getting railed up the ass in Canada.

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Im with shaw in alberta, have a bandwidth cap and 50/3 connection for $60. My household has gone over the cap many times and i've never been charged extra nor warned about overuse. I guess you are stuck with rogers/bell. Should come more west, more options here, probably why we're getting better speeds just as this article conveys.

I just got verizon fios, fiber up to the house 25/25 connection, 197 channels of tv and phone for $99.. Its uncapped too...

Try australia... 5/1 Mbit connection, 120GB per month $50. No extras :(