Regulatory capture is only a secondary reason why many parts of the USA still lack cheap, reliable broadband Internet access. It turns out that running fiber everywhere is expensive, and in some areas the potential customer base doesn't justify the cost.

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rconti an hour ago | parent | next [-]

It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth.. unless and until there's competition.

Funny how quickly my internet options went from expensive cable internet, to 1 gig symmetric fiber for $90, to 10 gig symmetric fiber for $50. And now, magically, Xfinity has 1Gbps+ service for $50 as well.

	▲	ghaff 42 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		I most certainly don’t have 1 Gps+ service for $50 though in practice my circa 50-100 Mps service for about twice that works fine does for me from Xfinity. I care a lot more about reliability.
	▲	parineum 40 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> It doesn't justify the cost when they can just rip you off, charging the same amount for a fraction of the bandwidth... You can start a company right now and lay fiber in these places and start your own telecom. You probably don't have the money for that but, if you put together a solid business plan, a bank would give you a loan. You may not have the experience or expertise to do that, but there are plenty of people who do. Why hasn't that happened yet? It turns out that laying down miles of fiber for a handful of customers isn't profitable. Google dod it in a few places that were low hanging fruit. Places that had telephone poles where they could get relatively easy access to them. There are certainly places where access to those poles is more difficult than it should be but most places are hampered by either being too remote to justify the cost of burying lines to a few customers (rural areas) or the digging is too expensive to many customers (suburban areas) because they'd be digging up streets.

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FireBeyond an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, a primary reason would include "spineless legislators who allowed carriers to say "We'd need tens of billions of subsidies to even consider doing this", and then when given that money to do so, just... largely didn't. And kept cruising without consequence (and with the money).