this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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if that were only possible here. i'd love to pay 10 percent of my bill for 10 percent of the speed. that'd be $10 for 50mbps. the cable company 'discontinues' slower speeds, calls it a 'free' upgrade (but you don't actually get it unless you know about it and call in and navigate their bullshit in order to actually get it 'free'), then raises rates anyway (even on those that did not 'upgrade'). every. single. year. the only other provider is the telephone company. needless to say, they're even worse.
That's not how it works, you generally pay 20% less for half the speed. Because speed is not the main price factor anymore. The logistics and cabling are.
I we didn't have 500 Mbit and above, you'd probably have to pay the same for 100 Mbit as we do for 1 Gbit today.
The price is in the cabling, maintenance and support. And none of those change much from having higher speeds.
city power here charges households $10 a month for that, the infrastructure and 'account servicing'; and bill usage at cost. electric distribution costs a hell of a lot more than coax. so make that hypothetical bill $20, then. better paying $20 for what you'll use and need than $100 for wasted service. it costs the big providers a few pennies per mbps to provide unthrottled, uncapped wireline broadband in the u.s., your bill is almost entirely profit for them.
No that's not true, there is actually competition here and a very transparent market.
30 years ago when 2 Mbit/s was relatively new here, ADSL on existing phone lines had a price of 69,- €. (cheapest provider at the time)
Even without accounting for inflation, the price now is cheaper for 1 Gigabit, despite the old ADSL was based on existing cables! And 1 Gbit obviously is on fibre optic cables made specifically for internet connection.
The cost of establishing fiber networks was expensive, and it is only recently that some of the companies are turning decent profits, and I think most of the profit is on selling TV packs and extra services like cloud storage and virus protection. My internet bill has about 5 points of extra services that all have a nice round zero on them. 😋
I have made the measurements, and at 500 Mbit/s I actually got a bit more than 5x what I had at 100 Mbit/s. Actually my 500 Mbit connection ran as 550, because the rated speed here is the guaranteed speed of the connection. So the only limitation is the server at the other end.
It is true however that 1 Gbit/s didn't quite double the 500 Mbit/s speed, Actual measured facts beat speculation.
But your examples of steeply diminishing returns are not true.