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Post by Mr Trev on Mar 16, 2018 3:17:15 GMT
Man, I'd kill for fierce competition. Here - in Canada - we have a duopoly. You either get your internet from the phone company or the cable company. The cell phone situation isn't much better either…
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Javier
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Digital bytes
Posts: 986
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Post by Javier on Mar 16, 2018 8:38:04 GMT
I should have mentioned that that mostly happens in larger cities, in some parts of the country there is still a monopoly as no one wants to invests heavily in areas of low population density where they will most likely never recover the required investment. Even if the Government tries to push carriers to do it, it is not that easy. In this places they are still on slow copper lines or wireless.
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Rabbit
Administrator
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Post by Rabbit on Mar 16, 2018 15:27:01 GMT
I’m lucky here because we live in a remote place but we are between two small farming towns, so the system was set up here to serve them and we’re bang in the middle. I was on copper wiring when we first moved here and BT suddenly contacted me to see if I’d like 50 at that time. I jumped at it because I wanted to set up TV stuff and then fairly recently, I. He led it and found that they had put it up to 74 without even telling me.
So we’re lucky and can run TV through it easily and use the internet on computers at the same time.
Before I moved here, in the big house I lived in, we only had 3 on a good day and TV wasn’t possible. We were extremely cut off there so no one was interested in putting fibre optic in.
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Post by marveltone on Mar 17, 2018 3:24:41 GMT
I figure it's about 14 miles line of sight to the tower. Approximately the same distance to the nearest fiber-optic line. I was told it costs about $20,000 per mile to lay fiber-optic cables. Only half a dozen families live on Minnesota Hill. Not much profit potential for the cost involved. Hence, wireless.
Seems to be running quite smoothly, so far. I can actually stream videos now!
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Post by Mr Trev on Mar 17, 2018 16:14:57 GMT
Yup fibre-optic ain't cheap. I remember when I was working at our local college and one of the maintenance workers accidentally cut the cable. $10k repair job just to splice it back together
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Rabbit
Administrator
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Post by Rabbit on Mar 18, 2018 10:25:29 GMT
Mind you, while having really fast internet is really good, what happens is that you begin to rely on it so if anything goes wrong, it hits you much harder.
For instance, recently we were off for a week.
I suddenly had to go without internet, Sky TV, Amazon TV, Netflix, Prime Music and I was supposed to have sent an advert film that I had made to a customer which was all impossible.
It was then when I realised that we have become totally reliant on fast internet.
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