Meanwhile I have traffic-shaped Comcast and no fiber in sight in Silicon Valley.
And yes, they and ATT lobbied extensively to block communities from building out their own ISPs because they didn't want to compete. Michigan has a law in place where a municipality can't build out a service if at least 3 companies are willing to bid on running 'high speed' internet service in a town.
I have only ever had issues for a period of 2 months during peak times when my traffic was being routed through another ISP that I would always get ~0.2% packet loss from. WK&T helped me identify some routes that were unaffected to set up a tunnel to work around it for the few times I was affected.
A few years ago my local ISP (Cincinnati bell) literally stopped their profitable roll out of fiber in the city for the better part of a year. They got a huge subsidy to put fiber in the exurbs around the city, and shifted all of their people to those areas. Go figure.
But yeah, it just goes to show that with the right opportunity and motivation, you can really do some cool things in places you wouldn't expect. I used to work remotely for a company in Chattanooga, and I was always blown away by the internet speeds whenever I visited the HQ. I remember downloading a 300mb file in 10s, in 2015. The story behind how it all came to happen is quite cool too.
(Also the story of why Hyperloop is pointless. technology isn’t the problem that needs solving! Fast rapid transit tech has existed since the 1980’s and it’s not the cost issue.)
Also Elon Musk admitted that he had no intention of building hyperloop, it was just a way to detail HSR so he could sell more cars.
https://www.dwt.com/blogs/broadband-advisor/2015/03/googles-...
https://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2022/aug/24/chattanoogas...
Isn't the SF bay area more of a geography issue than an incumbent monopoly issue? I'm sure its a mixture of both, but also a geography issue.
Drive 10-20 miles, and you'll be in areas where AT&T decided to sell the lines to a bankrupt telco. Looking at the lines in those areas is entertaining. The telephone poles were installed by some ancient secret society named "GTE", and now have 20 degree bows. When lines loosen up and block traffic, the usually just tie them up on to some nearby tree branch.
If you look really carefully, you'll occasionally see fiber points of presence dangling precariously from this mess of caution tape and guy-wire.
It's not all bad news: I know of communities outside of telco right of way that managed to tap into one of those.
Last time I heard they were debating between 1 gig symmetric to each home or paying a couple hundred bucks (one time) per house to get something comparable to what you'd expect in Tennessee.
It's definitely a problem with incumbent monopolies.
Drive 10-20 miles, and you'll be in areas where AT&T decided to sell the lines
to a bankrupt telco. Looking at the lines in those areas is entertaining. The
telephone poles were installed by some ancient secret society named "GTE", and
now have 20 degree bows. When lines loosen up and block traffic, the usually just
tie them up on to some nearby tree branch.
In fact I just took a quick peek at their Wikipedia page. GTE went bankrupt in 1933 and recovered. They were not part of the Bell system until 2000 when they were acquired by Bell Atlantic as part of the creation of Verizon.
Monopolies suck but GTE (and Verizon) were almost always better about building out higher speed DSL and fiber than PacBell/SBC/AT&T ever were.
Is that frontier? I'm pretty sure those lines were never at&t. A local phone company, then gte, then verizon, then frontier. IIRC.
Verizon is a descendent of babybells, but that doesn't make everything they touch at&t.