Do you tend to get like four providers to choice from? Is it more like two per address?

I’m trying to compare internet in the United States and European countries.

I did find that that Center for Public Integrity states that French people can sometimes have as many as 6 internet providers to choice from, but I can’t find any similar data for any other European countries.

40 comments
  1. It depends on the location. You’ll have one or two physical providers, and a handful of service providers.

  2. I just put my address into a site that lets you compare deals on broadband and it offered me services from 11 providers: BT, Sky, Vodafone, Plusnet, Shell Energy Broadband, Now Broadband, TalkTalk, Onestream, Pop Telecom, Direct Save Telecom and Virgin Media.

  3. Out here in rural areas (in one of the scandinavian countries) there’s one company who recently built fiber net for the area, so there’s just that one. In the cities there’s usually around four.

  4. So – hold onto your hat – here in the UK we have over *one hundred and fifty* broadband providers (source: [USwitch](https://www.uswitch.com/broadband/providers/), a service comparison site here in the UK) and how many can provide service at your address depends on where you live. For example, I’m in Glasgow, but at my postcode I get something like seven broadband providers. The network providers – as in the companies that own the actual cabling – are usually OpenReach (which is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT or British Telecom), Sky or Virgin.

  5. Multiply the number of countries with, let’s say five (totally made up number, but the question makes no sense)

    Edit: change the number five to something like 30 based on the amount some countries have

  6. >French people can sometimes have as many as 6 internet providers to choice from,

    That’s cute. Right now I can choose from 28 different fiber ISP and I guess it would be possible for a year or two more to use DSL. There’s an *open* fiber that any ISP that wants can provide service to.

  7. When it comes to fixed connection to the apartment or house, like fibre, there is only one choice out of three providers, the company that owns those cables. With wireless there are three providers which offer very similar services in most built up areas.

  8. Depends on the country, region and you know local area as like anywhere else. I only had one to choose because my landlord had pre-installed fiber for the apartment from one company. But the city as a whole probably has like 12 but again the availability depends on where you live in the city.

    My hometown had like only 2 major providers. The Municipality owned ISP and the partly state owned ISP. Some adresses had access to more, it varied a bit on where you lived. But those with most coverage was the Municipality owned ISP and the partly state owned.

  9. I live in small village so two. Ofc I am not talking about mobile internet.

    One is huge German company(Slovak subsidy), but we still don’t have optic here(cmon now, even smaller and mountain villages have it). Speed for my address is awful(10/1). Other one is local provider. I pay 10 €/month for 100/50, so pretty good for village without optic.

    Ofc towns and cities have a lot more options.

  10. About six everywhere in Prague, and 10s of different providers in different parts of the city.

  11. Sweden, here in my area we have broadband so that is one company only but then I get to choose who is my internet provider and that 18 companies at the moment.
    Yes I have one bill for the broadband and one for the internet provider.

    I could skip broadband and have mobile internet but the speed isnt that great and it is more expensive then what I pay for per month.

  12. It varies by postcode, not every company is able to provide services at every building.

    But in general, you will at least have one type of connection available (DSL, Cable, or Fiber usually). If it’s DSL, there’s an obligation that the dominant DSL provider sells access to their copper write network to other companies who want to compete as “virtual ISPs”. If you only have cable or fiber, then it’s conceivable but not certain that you only have one ISP to chose from (but you could go for mobile internet or satellite internet if desperate enough).

    This answer works for both Cyprus and Germany.

  13. In Ireland you can easily choose from at least six (or more) but it will depend on the area. In reality, there’s only a maximum of three broadband infrastructure providers and all six will either be one of the owners of the broadband infrastructure or else they’ll rent it from the ones that own it at a regulated cost.

  14. In my new flat I can chose from 9 providers. Most of them provide 1Gbit fiber optic connection. This is rather small city (40k people).

  15. I have “free internet” but it is limited to 500mbit up and down since the infrastructure are getting old. Its from 1998 and is owned by the housing cooperative, it is a common solution in Sweden. The cost for the housing cooperative is about 72sek (6USD) per month and apartment. They just included it in the monthly rent payment, you cant opt out of it.

    We also have like an open network that is owned by the local government and it is fibre directly in to the apartment. I have some 30 different service providers i can chose from in that system. I think you can get up to 10Gbit in that system but i am fine with the 500mbit that comes with the apartment.

    Internet has only been down once that i have noticed in the 10 year i have lived here. It was when a construction company cut the main cable going to the entire island that i live on, it was an accident so they fixed it pretty fast. I was down for about 2h-3h.

  16. Italy:

    Telecom Italia

    Vodafone

    Fastweb

    WindTre

    Iliad

    Tiscali

    BT Italia

    Sky Italia

    Eolo

    Linkem

    Those are the first ones springing to my mind, but there are a few other ones.

  17. Right now at my address I have a choice of 7 big internet providers using cable, dsl or fibre optic.

  18. For a long time it was just KPN with ADSL, which was a bit slow, and Ziggo, with cable, for a lot of people in the Netherlands. Now more and more households are being connected to fiberglass, from different providers, depeding on where you live. Some providers allow only their own services over their fiberglass, but others also lease their fiberglass to other providers. In our town it’s a company called E-fiber, which only owns the fiberglass, and lets about ten smaller providers offer services over their network.

  19. One factor in the UK’s broadband market is that many ISP’s basically resell a standard service as set out by a network operator called Openreach.

    So if you get service from BT, Zen or Shell, it will basically be the same VDSL / FTTC / FTTP service, but speeds and included TV packages may differ.

    Other companies like Sky, TalkTalk and Vodafone have their own networks, and equipment in most telephone exchanges.

    Finally, Virgin Media, the only cable ISP in the country, cover about 55% of the population in cities and major metropolitan areas.

  20. I could choose out of a bunch of providers (I mean almost any provider in the whole country), because the system is built where the main provider that built the infrastructure has to rent it out and make it available for any other provider, so it is up to me who I’m paying to.

    I decided with one of them. I got 10 gigabits for around 45 dollars a month.

  21. I have 4 different companies that provide internet in my building, 3 of which are fiber

  22. A quick search revealed 29 options for me. There are 2-3 big providers here, and the rest are service providers (a comment above explained those).

  23. 4 physical providers in France:
    – free
    – orange
    – SFR
    – bouygues

    I have a fiber internet with free for 39 euros/month (internet, TV, landline)

    With DL: 882mbits and upload: 626mbits
    From my house to Paris servers.

  24. In my area there is technically only Nextgentel and Telenor for fixed Connection (Fiber) and Telenor, Telia and Altibox (ICE) Wireless

  25. It very much depends on the country, but here in the second biggest city in Luxembourg (in most coutries it’d be at best a medium sized town), I have the choice of five providers.

  26. About 20, depending on what is installed in your home and for a few very out of the way places there might be some issues. But they will use either cable network, copper cables, fiber cables, or 5G networks, some providers of the physical connections only cover parts of the country, like some areas will have one company owning the cable network, but every provider that has deals with them can provide services over it.

  27. I used to have celular broadband but recently changed to fiber optics.

    First of, nationally there are three celular networks, and at least 20 operators to choose from, most if not all offer mobile broadband solutions. Where I live I get around 70-100 Mbit/s on any of three networks.

    I have two physical fiber optics to choose from, and I have 7 different ISPs to choose from, most of them are available on both cables. More should be available later this year I’m told.

    I cut over my phone cable a couple of years ago, if I didn’t, I’d have maybe 5-10 ISPs to choose from there as well.

    If I had cable TV I’d have even further ISPs to choose from…

    Some of the ISPs are the same on mobile, fiber and DSL though.

  28. I actually had to check, and there are 60+ internet providers in Norway. However, most of them are small and only provide internet in restricted geographic areas. On a national level, there are 3-4 big players. So in reality, most people will have a choice of one of the big providers or a small local provider.

  29. My address has 10 providers to choose from but admittedly I’ve never even heard of a lot of them. Hard to say the average across the country tho

  30. It varies per country. Yes Europe is a continent made up from different countries. The us is one country made up from different states. In my country Cyprus there is one main infrastructure provider, a second one is in the making and 2 other as resellers one of them with a limited coverage. There are many wisp providers.

  31. There are 4 operators with their own network: Movistar, Vodafone, Orange and Masmovil. These are the biggest ones, but there are also other companies with their own small and regional networks.

    As for providers that rent this network to offer their services, there are more than 30, it depends a lot on where you are because many of them are that are limited to an Autonomous Community/State or even to a town or city.

  32. It depends where you live. In bugger towns and cities you will usually have a choice of service provider and there will be many, last time I lived in a big town there were about 8 or 9 but up here in the sticks we’ve got three options and two of them are slow as shit.

  33. At my address there are 5 fibre providers available. But I live in a city centre, it is of course worse in rural areas.

  34. I live in a mid-sized town in Poland. For my address, there are 7 listed physical providers – 4 with fiber and 3 with copper cables (I count only the physical cables, not all the operating service providers). That’s in a housing project, but there are also streets here where only 1-2 providers are available – the situation is not uncommon in districts consisting of single-family houses.

    Not long ago there were some parts of the countryside with no physical Internet access and only mobile Internet providers available. Fortunately, the whole region (and, for now, almost the whole country) was recently covered with open-access fiber that can be accessed via various service providers even in the tiniest villages.

  35. Romania: DIGI (which has the best fiber in Europe), Orange and Vodafone.
    But you don’t really need Orange or Vodafone unless you live in countryside where for example Orange bought Romtelecom, the most powerful telecommunication company in Romania.
    I lived in most european countries there no faster internet like here.

  36. Italy is notoriously bad in this matter. It depends on the location, with most of the country with one physical infrastructure (talking about fiber obv) divided between two providers. There’s a handful of cities with great coverage where you can choose between about 4 providers and 2 or 3 physical lines. The mobile providers are on par with the rest of europe, there’s a lot of them but the main ones are 5 or 6

  37. Portugal, 10million ppl, 3 nation wide providers and 2 or 3 more in the big cities (big cities in pt is over 200.000

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