[rayiner]

In Maryland, all work in rights of way must be done by a company specially authorized by the state to perform utility-related construction. Then each county has licensing and permitting processes for work "related" to telecom utilities. Additionally, our utilities are above ground, and our neighborhood is too tight to allow use of a trencher, so all that work was done by hand. This is just how much of the northeast/mid-atlantic is. It's a double-edged sword: these are relatively high-density places where a single fiber cable can serve a lot of houses. But at the same time, they tend to be already built up (my subdivision was laid out in 1920), dense with narrow access ways, and in counties/states with lots of bureaucracy. (I am currently working on a "vegetation management plan" so I can clear the weeds from my backyard.)

For one-off fiber installs, Comcast uses active Ethernet instead of GPON, so maybe that's why the CPE installation took so long. Although, to be fair, I'm counting the time it took to drill a hole in the foundation as part of the half day of CPE install and the time to configure the router/access point--neither of which your average customer is qualified to do themselves.