@jextxadore it’s a long story that can be summarized as follows:
Outside of major metro areas, cable companies are the only service provider capable of providing modern broadband speeds at scale.
Traditional telcos have largely given up on upgrading their existing infrastructure for most residential customers, though in some major cities, you may be able to get fiber or similar.
Any time anyone has tried building alternatives in a given area, particularly using existing infrastructure (adding new cables to existing poles, etc), the cable companies and/or local telcos play every game in the book to prevent competitors from gaining any sort of foothold.
Wireless phone service for most people is operated by the same traditional telcos. They ARE upgrading that infrastructure and speeds/coverage is improving, but they also have limits (throttling after consuming a certain amount of bandwidth) and overall speeds are still slower and at higher latency than the cable company offering is.
Satellite Internet has been tried for more rural places without cable or phone companies but it’s very expensive/slow. Elon Musk is planning some sort of commercial internet service using low-earth orbit satellites that promises to be much faster/cheaper, but it’s not launched yet and it remains to be seen how viable that offering will be.
Bottom line: it’s a fucking mess. The one country that has it worse than us: Canada.
/@matigo