The cable lobby loves to bring up rural areas but when we gave them millions to build out they just took the money, said fuck it and did jack shit. I'm beginning to think that they prefer to under serve those areas and then use that as a bargaining chip to get everything they want.
I am in New England. Looking to buy a home. The amount of area that is not covered at 100/10 is fucking criminal. Like, they upped my price this year. For what? Transferring packets didn't get more expensive. Did you go e your employees raises? No? Are you expanding your infrastructure? No?
Numerous places I've lived had contracts with Comcast so there was no option but them, and the speed is shit, maybe they needed to raise prices to pay for their forced monopolies.
I almost feel bad for rural people until I realize they're the ones voting for the people who make sure rural people don't get services. Redneck America wants to close the USPS for fuck sakes.
My parents live in butt fuck nowhere and are in a fiber co-op paying like $70/month for unlimited 1gbps up/down.
Meanwhile I live in the (extremely left) Capitol City of my state and pay Comcast $165/month for like 175mbps capped at 1TB, with some absurd overage fee like $10/5GB over until I hit $100 over and then it's "unlimited" but seems throttled.
In Australia we watched American ISPs do exactly that and then we did the exact same thing with the exact same result because our politicians are corrupt pieces of shit with no backbone, integrity or ethics.
The dumbasses that gave them the money should have made it so the companies did the work FIRST, then get reimbursed when they could prove they finished it. Whole thing was stupid.
Comcast for decades have said on their website they support my parent's address but they obviously do not since there are no cables on the poles for Internet. We've tried calling and asking to fix it and we've tried calling to just get someone out so we can prove they don't service it but each time we scheduled an appointment nobody showed up and when calling back they would say they never set one up. So I'm pretty sure you're correct.
"By the end of 2014, America will have been charged about $400 billion by the local phone incumbents, Verizon, AT&T and CenturyLink, for a fiber optic future that never showed up."
TL;DR: they took billions from the government to build fiber infrastructure then said, "sorry that wasn't enough. Give us more and we swear we'll build it this time." They just pocketed the money.