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Comment by kziemio | Hacker News Reader

Because cable has improved enough that no consumers really needs fiber to their homes. You can get 300-1000 Mbps cable internet now in most places and it is far more than anyone really needs. Upload bandwidth is the main limitation of cable internet but that's not a major factor for most people.

If cable internet was still stuck at 25 Mbps or similar, the pressure for fiber internet would be a lot stronger.

But cable internet got good.

The backwards and scandalous aspect of modern American internet is that the ISPs managed to roll out 1 TB data caps without being blocked by lawmakers.

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This is spot on - A large majority of residential internet customers would see no difference between a 50/5 plan and a 300/30 plan. I done a significant amount of consulting in the ISP would and every time we would do mass speed increases there would be virtually no increase in aggregate traffic levels. As long as people could go to a speed test and get their subscribed speed they were happy. An HD Netflix stream takes the same amount of bandwidth no matter what your max speed is.

Most consumers aren't willing to pay the monthly cost that ISPs would be need to charge to make overbuilding fiber economically feasible. DSL providers overbuild with fiber because they can't compete with cable and the rising cost of maintenance of a copper plant. Some cable providers will do new builds with FTTH or overbuild when upgrading the existing plant is cost prohibitive. But overbuilding a working coax plant almost never makes since. Spending millions of dollars to offer higher speeds at the same price just doesn't make business sense.

Maybe it's a regional thing, but the comcast cable internet my parents have is absolute shit. They just upgraded from 300 to 600 and that did basically nothing (still get about 25 mbps most of the time and it occasionally now goes to 50 mbps in speed tests) and our video conferencing calls stutter all the god damn time which literally never happened back in my apartment that had fiber.

cable here (vancouver canada) is still limited to ~25 up. Not sure if that's a tech limitation or an ISP choice thou.

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