It pains me to say this: I chose Comcast over a local ISP because the company lowered my rate and doubled my speed.

I now pay $54 per month—down from $67 per month—for an Internet-only rate of 100Mbps. It's proof that when there's competition, lower prices can happen. Or put another way, it's how the market-dominant player can squeeze out the little guy.

Let me explain. I've been a Comcast customer for about 3.5 years now, but I was open to switching if an alternative came along. A few weeks ago, some of my Oakland, California neighbors posted on our local e-mail list that Sonic was now available locally. I was thrilled!

Sonic, as Ars has reported before, is a local, independent, pro-privacy ISP, based in Santa Rosa, California, just 55 miles north of San Francisco. I used to be a Sonic customer, and I still have my @sonic.net e-mail address from many years ago.

As soon as I signed up for Sonic’s fiber-to-the-node (FTTN) service, I was stoked: $76 per month for 50Mbps. That would have been a $9 difference for basically the same level of service, but with all the killer customer service and indie, crunchy-granola feels that being a Sonic customer brings.

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, a lot of Sonic customers are actually served on existing AT&T cables. (Where I live we're still waiting for that fiber rollout.) So that meant Sonic needed to send out an AT&T technician who spent something like six hours in my house and in the street replacing cables and doing God knows what. When it was all said and done, I had a fancy AT&T-branded wireless router sitting in my kitchen. Plus, I had a little dongle that I could plug a phone into and have a sweet VOIP phone.

For a few weeks, I was running both in parallel. But, after I tested it, I wasn’t getting that much better speeds than I was getting through Comcast (where I had 50Mbps): it was essentially a wash. So, I thought, in the name of promoting small businesses, I would switch to Sonic, even if it meant spending a marginal premium.

However, I thought I should give Comcast one last chance. (Fortunately for me, Sonic granted a 30-day money-back guarantee grace period.) When I called Comcast, I was fully prepared to tell them to go take a hike.

But Comcast came back at me directly with an offer I couldn't refuse: 100Mbps at $54 per month. I didn't have to argue with a retention rep, or resort to histrionics. I didn't have to beg for them to keep me or engage in complicated verbal swordplay. It was shockingly easy. All I had to do, the rep said, was reset my cable modem. The entire call couldn't have lasted more than three minutes.

What I wrote in May 2014 still holds true. In short, I don’t want to be a Comcast customer, but the reality is that it remains the best service available to me. I couldn’t justify spending 40 percent more for a service that was half as fast.

Now, don't get me wrong. I consider myself lucky to even have such a choice of real broadband providers. After all, as Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said in 2014, about 80 percent of Americans live in areas where they can buy 25Mbps service, but generally from only one ISP. The FCC raised its definition of broadband to 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream, from 4Mbps/1Mbps, in January 2015. Under this measure, Comcast has 56 percent of the market.

“At 25Mbps, there is simply no competitive choice for most Americans,” Wheeler said at a speech in Washington, DC. “Stop and let that sink in... three-quarters of American homes have no competitive choice for the essential infrastructure for 21st century economics and democracy. Included in that is almost 20 percent who have no service at all! Things only get worse as you move to 50Mbps where 82 percent of consumers lack a choice.”

Indeed as the above chart shows, the New America Foundation concluded in 2014 empirically what I'd figured out anecdotally after living in Germany for two years: "the majority of U.S. cities…lag behind their international peers."

So, imagine what the American Internet landscape would look like if my fellow citizens had proper competition, as they do in many parts of Europe and Asia? We'd all be saving money and getting better service.