My understanding is that homeowners in the bay area have some next level NIMBY ism that even Google can't overcome. Those fiber huts have to go somewhere...
Maybe this is an overreaction to being stuck with Australian internet for the past decade, but if anyone in my neighbourhood was to resist the installation of fibre it'd be fucking on for young and old.
Actually we finally got NBN on my street and I am syncing at 75mbit (paying for 100) and frankly I am over the moon. The fastest I have had previous, after living all over AU, was 14mbit down, and I was the envy of my friends for that roaring waterfall of data.
Everyone else I know is on around 8mbit even in 2018.
Hoping against hope that we get a similar result when NBN rolls around to my neighbourhood. It would be absolutely awful for them to "upgrade" our system, after waiting so long for this, to the exact same or worse speeds as the ADSL we've been stuck with all this time.
And yet companies like AT&T and Comcast have been able to improve their infrastructure and launch fiber in more and more areas in the Bay Area (it's more than just San Francisco, you know!)
The cause is not NIMBYism, or any other negative traits you might try to tag on to people from the Bay, but rather, the existing telecom companies and their attempts to protect their pseudo-monopoly.
Well, when you spend several million dollars to buy a house I understand you're likely to be afraid of anything that threaten your investment and turning NIMBY.