Ask HN: How can I get decent internet speeds in my apartment?
I feel like I’m going crazy.
I live in a dense metropolitan area (Hollywood, Los Angeles), surrounded on all sides by buildings with fiber and high-speed cable. Yet I can’t get any wired internet service in my small, old 5-unit building.
Right now I’m forced to use Verizon 5G Home Internet. Download speeds are fine, but latency is bad and upload speeds are abysmal (5 Mbps), which is a real problem for my work (large uploads, remote collaboration, etc).
Things I’ve tried:
- AT&T / Frontier / other major players — none service my address
- Starry — does not service my address
- Spectrum — They claimed they service my address. The technician showed up and searched around the building for ~1 hour. Then said they’d need approval from their boss to install a box. The next day, their boss calls and says it won’t be possible — something about construction being too expensive / not feasible. (This is who recommended I try Starry)
As far as I can tell, I have:
- No fiber
- No cable
- No DSL
Is there any realistic way to pressure or incentivize an ISP to wire a small building? Or is there a creative solution I’m overlooking?
It feels absurd to have to move homes just because I’m stuck with cellular internet in 2026 in the middle of Los Angeles. If the building management is amenable to it, and somebody nearby has fiber near the building already, if you get enough residents to sign up for it, they will usually extend to the building and build out at no cost to the building (recouping the fixed costs as part of monthly service). If this is not an option, do you have clear line of site to a building that could service with fixed wireless? Got it. I think the trouble is our building is only 5 units, 2 of which are occupied by elderly people who likely don’t care. So feels unlikely that Spectrum / AT&T would undergo construction for just 3 new subscribers. (We’re surrounded by much larger apartment buildings, which is probably why they’re wired and we aren’t). Perhaps worth checking on though. Re: fixed wireless, would that typically offer higher speeds than my current 5G home internet? Verizon advertises my plan as 25-75Mbps upload, but I never see that. I worry it’d be the same with any over the air service, but I haven’t really explored fixed wireless. Fixed wireless would offer more consistency than 5G residential service, as the 5G service is lowest priority on the tower and a way to squeeze more revenue out of the network and spectrum. Due to how few units there are, your options are fairly limited unfortunately. You might try bonding together ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile 5G Home service with a compatible router if there are no other options. It’ll cost ~$120-$140/month, but you’d have diversity that might improve the overall experience. When done natively vs using their 5G home devices, this is referred to as “cellular carrier aggregation.” This is exactly the type of uncommon solution I was seeking. Thank you so much! Good luck, wishing you consistent latency and throughput.