top | item 30091657

(no title)

eddyb | 4 years ago

I live in Bucharest, Romania and I pay $9/mo for 1Gbps FTTH (fiber into my flat, with an ISP-provided fiber terminal).

This offering is available from digi.ro pretty much throughout most major cities (so city area doesn't matter unless you go outside, into suburbs and villages - not sure how far the fiber penetration reaches).

They announced 10Gbps a few months ago, for only a 25% price increase (someone else linked the announcement already) - but I'm still on the waiting list, and I'm not sure what their deployment progress is like.

I wish I could offer real numbers for 10Gbps - for 1Gbps I remember getting:

* >900Mbps download locally (P2P, fast.com, etc.)

* 300-500Mbps both directions, across Europe (e.g. to Hetzner servers)

* not sure about intercontinental, but I suspect latency could be more of a problem there, depending on your usecase

(Frankly, consumer networking equipment has been getting in the way of reliably maxing out what the ISP offers, in a multi-device environment, and I've been procrastinating getting more professional hardware since the difference is mostly only visible when measuring it explicitly)

As for affordability: you can live here decently for around $1k/mo, maybe a bit more depending on rent, so if you have an international source of income (or a good chunk of savings), you could easily spend years here.

(Most of my monthly costs go towards food, and I don't have good points of reference for that - I can't remember what it was called, but there was at least one website for breakdowns of living costs in various parts of the world)

One downside is you may need to learn a bit of the language, depending on how much you need to interact with the average person that might not know any English (but this has gotten easier with e.g. using delivery during lockdowns).

OTOH, English has been permeating a lot more, starting with millennials, so you could get lucky.

Have fun! (though realistically there are likely more convenient options)

discuss

order

999900000999|4 years ago

How hard is it to get a visa ?

1k a month isn't bad at all. I imagine if I had a million dollar saved up in 10 years, I could just move there.

And then live forever off my investments, plus as you've already mentioned, many younger people know some English.

I'm guessing for an American Eastern Europe would be less of a culture shock than say Thailand

MathYouF|4 years ago

Culture shock isn't the only thing that factors into quality of life though. There's a lot of places in the US you could go that you might dislike living in but wouldn't necessarily introduce a significant culture shock compared to a foreign country.

Just wanted to point out that out, as I've lived in Asia and Eastern Europe and despite the greater culture shock in the former, still preferred it as a long term residence. One's personal preferences and expectations for life can affect that a lot.