[toast0]

Lack of competition is a big factor in US pricing, although cost of labor, and regulatory burdens probably raises the floor price.

Competiton is rare because of several factors. The most important one being overbuilding a new network on an area with existing wiring is expensive, time consuming, and unlikely to result in enough customers to make a good return on investment; especially since the incumbent networks are likely to respond by upgrading their network, usually faster than the overbuild. For a historical example, look at Google's fiber build out announcement for 10 or so cities, followed by AT&Ts announcement for most of the same cities, and then Google's retraction after AT&T actually built the network, and Google hadn't even got planning approval for their Fiber boxes.

The solution is local loop unbundling, as congress provided in the telecom act of 1996, and the FCC dismantled over the ensuing decade. Ideally, more fully realised as in other countries, where the local loop provider(s) are never the service providers. It doesn't make sense to run a large number of networks to the same houses in the same city; instead, that part should be leasable, with providers servicing the connections from central locations.

[mistrial9]

this supply-side analysis is relevent and well-spoken, yet one wonders what has been done with the already-in-place guranteed income from managed-monopoly markets around the US for the last 25 years ?