[mint2]

Heck just living in the wrong neighborhood in freaking Orange County California can mean the only options are att with 5mb dsl or cox charging ridiculous amounts for cable.

Im not even talking about the outskirts of the OC. If you happen to live in the wrong part of town or even the wrong building; your current internet choices could be drastically worse than the house 100 yards away.

A couple blocks down my neighbors get att fiber and google fiber. I get tons of ads for those fiber services just so they can rub in my limited choices of paying att ridiculous amounts for bad dsl or Coxs even higher prices for the lowest tiered cable.

[hedora]

I used to live in walking distance of downtown Mountain View (a short bike ride to Google HQ). It was similar to what you describe.

I think we ended up with less than 6MBit theoretical download. Later, we moved a few blocks and got 10x that.