[atotic]

Anecdote: I live in Palo Alto, and my entire neighborhood is on Comcast. In January, service got to be really bad, 1Mbs upload during the day. Comcast came out, said our local node was saturated at 92%, and that they have an upgrade planned a year from now, and that we can suck it till then.

This is Palo Alto, the land of very vocal neighbors. They started a campaign where we all sent a complaint to the FCC. Within a week, we were personally contacted by a Comcast rep, techs came out, and suddenly I had 30Mbs up. And Comcast reps have been calling, emailing every week to make sure we are ok. Not sure what happened, the node did not get upgraded, but they fixed something.

And another data point on how sad the situation is in the US: my brother lives in Belgrade, Serbia, in one of those concrete high-rises from the 70s. He got fiber this year from a private company, and his speeds beat mine, and it is dirt cheap. There is no logical explanation for the fact that his internet speeds beat mine, and I am a mile away from Google HQ.