My local ISP trenched fiber to my house for free and provides gig internet for $80/month.
The funny thing is my previous house was in town and I had to settle for 100Mbit for the same price. ISPs are all sorts of messed up.
In the city it’s often just as easy to let what is working continue “working” - a major rollout takes a lot of money.
(I'm on Comcast's Business service, $250/mo for 1000/35 [long dumb story why]. Most of the time I see under 600 down when checking on speed test sites, and real-world speeds downloading large files rarely exceeds 250. I expect real-world speeds on the non-business service are even worse.)
It's pretty embarrassing that this is the state of things.
Over in Oakland I am paying $40/mo to Sonic for 10Gbps (though I only have equipment to route at 1Gbps at the moment)
There's a benchmark posted there showing that the speed is really as advertised.
gnpUSD = {'USA': 21,650,000,000,000, 'THA': 491,910,000,000} #4th quarter 2021
pop = {'USA': 329,000,000, 'THA': 70,000,000} #as of 2021
gnp['USA'] // pop['USA'] 65805
gnp['THA'] // pop['THA'] 7027
Seems more like a distribution of resources issue... so why not jack up taxes on the wealthiest 1% and use it to pay for things like high-speed fiber in all the rural areas? Doubtless this would lead to economic growth?
Throwing more money at it usually makes that kind of problem WORSE not better.
> "The Rural Electrification Act of 1936, enacted on May 20, 1936, provided federal loans for the installation of electrical distribution systems to serve isolated rural areas of the United States. The funding was channeled through cooperative electric power companies, hundreds of which still exist today. (wiki)"
However there are just as many places where the state's government was bought off to ban such networks because the majors are afraid of actual competition.
It’s mostly been ineffective.