I’ve been hearing about “captured government” with respect to fiber deployment for two decades now and the folks on that soap box have made absolutely zero progress on improving deployment of fiber infrastructure in that time. Tilting at that windmill isn’t working, because for the most part that’s not the real problem.
Why isn’t the Bay Area a hot bed of fiber deployment? You think Comcast in Philly has more pull with Cupertino and Mountain View than Google and Apple? No! Internet in the Bay Area is shit for the same reason all the infrastructure in the Bay Area is shit. The government makes it slow and difficult to build anything.
Comcast installed fiber to my house back in 2018 or so. The permitting took months. And this was to run Comcast fiber on poles where Comcast already had their own cable lines. And my county is actually pretty efficient with permitting. It’s just that American municipalities absolutely hate it when anyone builds anything.
I guess Comcast doesn't need to capture the local government in places where it's already illegal to build anything. But in other places it has definitely happened.
In most places, permitting is the most direct and immediate roadblock. If you don't start there, you won't make any progress on the issue.
I live in a blue state that actively encourages municipal and cooperative fiber deployment: https://mdbc.us. It's had approximately zero impact outside some rural parts of the state.
Well, "deploying fiber" does not equal "starting a residential FTTP ISP". A ton of fiber infrastructure is only offered B2B.
If you think internet in the bay area is shit then you haven't seen how bad it can get. Even other large cities within California like LA and SD are worse.
Having lived in all three mentioned areas, none seemed particularly bad unless your standard is fiber straight to home. And seemed like Bay Area had more of that if anything.
I am absolutely not defending Comcast here but its worth pointing out that every anecdotal bit of evidence about performance and reliability can be true.
Network performance in that last mile can differ by block and even by season. An otherwise functional run of coax might have intermittent ingress but only shortly after it's rained while cold out.
This isn't even counting all of the flaky performance anecdotes that really boil down to overcrowded Wi-Fi or poorly configured consumer gear or anything else that isn't strictly the fault or problem of Comcast.
In college, we had the combination of spotty wifi + 10 dudes concurrently torrenting Shrek 2 + jank Android tablets running rogue DHCP servers and taking router's IP + rats chewing through cables, yet every time the internet went down, they called Comcast. And it was never actually Comcast's fault.
Maybe it's good enough that not very many people care. I moved around San Jose, Mountain View, Berkeley, and Sunnyvale, never noticed problems with Comcast or AT&T. Was expecting flakiness after hearing all these bad stories, but no, it was reliable.
What you don't get often is fiber-to-home, or great upload speeds. But most people aren't running big home servers.