[promptcritical]

I'm sure it does. I'm from West Virginia, by the way, where federal stimulus money for broadband expansion ($24 million) got funneled to Verizon Network Integration to put routers in libraries. They used $22,600 dollar Cisco 3945's.

I'm sure corruption, regulatory capture, incompetent politicians, and oligopolies have something to do with it too.

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201205050057

[res0nat0r]

I remember this story when it came out, but a single citation involving Cisco networking equipment is in no way relevant when comparing an already culturally wired country smaller than the state of Kentucky, and trying to extrapolate that should somehow be a viable option next month for Comcast to start laying down multimode fibre across 3.7 million square miles of land.

Yes Google Fiber has been a great success where it has been deployed so far, but that has relied on local government cooperation, incentives, right of ways, also neighborhood signup rates > $X for the rollout to even begin to happen. So just because South Korea can do this doesn't mean you should think somehow Comcast can roll 300 Megabit lines to the whole country.

Or you can believe they can roll that out to your local densely populated metro block, where 99% of your neighbors will then laugh at the price, and you can subsidize their non-payment with your $500/month bill.

[promptcritical]

First of all, I don't think anyone (least of all Comcast) is going to roll anything out "next month." This is not a new issue for the US (having crappy broadband). This article [1] talks about what came of the $200 billion the government gave away to telcos to help build out our infrastructure since 1990 (spoiler: nothing came of it)... and the article is from 2007 so the total giveaway is even more at this point. So I don't think this is a new problem that we are suddenly looking at "next month" solutions for.

Secondly, there is no incentive for anyone (again least of all Comcast) to roll out anything next month, next year, or next decade that would significantly improve broadband in the US. For that you would need meaningful competition. We don't have that here. That's why idiots like TW cable's CFO can say things like "nobody wants gigabit internet" [2] and all that happens is the tech media gets ruffled feathers for a few days. Why on earth would Comcast roll out anything other than what they already have? What are their customers going to do if they don't like it? Go to satellite? Slower but maybe more stable DSL?

Yeah, it was one anecdote, but it was one that highlights the political incompetence and corporate graft that help hold us back from having nice things.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...

[2] http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/02/time-warner-cab...

[res0nat0r]

> For that you would need meaningful competition. We don't have that here.

We also don't have a majority of customers who want to pay more than $40/month for internet.

Comcast has been rolling out decent internet, I currently have 105 megabit internet and I'm in a suburb, but it isn't cheap. I think many in the HN bubble over estimate the number of people who they think will pay for the monthly fee it would take for a company to roll out super fast internet in a place as large as the USA, even if it is just limited to major cities and their suburbs.

[promptcritical]

Inside or out of the HN bubble, if Comcast had real competition you wouldn't be paying nearly as much for your 105 megabit connection. You're kinda making my point.

[res0nat0r]

Sure about that? I'm not sure if a country the size of 1/50th of the USA can be easily comparable when it comes to physical infrastructure sunk costs.