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Their enemies are clear: anyone else, and especially cable companies, dark fiber owners, and anyone that thinks twice about FTTH-- if it's not theirs.

Hehehe, I have 20Mbps fiber which I am sure SBC and Comcast are not too happy about, but they can kiss my big black ass! As hard as it might be, we can only wish more small companies such as Surewest will be able to steal away customers from the behemoths.

Yes, in the long run it is really worth it to build fiber infrastructure. Companies like Surewest are investing for the future, and will play a big role in competing with the telcos and cable companies. I am lucky enough to live in an area where Surewest offers service, and they have 10Mbps and 20Mbps bi-directional packages available. I know it is nothing compared to the service you can get in other countries, but to have that big of a pipe to the Internet in Northern California is damned good. Surewest equipment is full 100Mbps, and can scale to 1Gbps without much upgrading (relatively).

Maybe I'm one of the lucky ones, but my fiber is lit up here in Sacramento, CA! Surewest has been great in providing the 10Mbps service to some areas here, although they still have a ways to go. But I have not had any problems, and it kicks DSL or Cable's ass any day of the week. Now whether they can survive against the behemoths of SBC or Comcast remains to be seen, but I am supporting them.

You can actually get a faster upload then 2mbps I think, but I am not totally sure. Either way you get a T-1 for way less than the business cost.

You can definitely get uploads faster than 2mbps. I am one of the lucky ones in my area to have fiber and they use some Cisco equipment that is 100Mbps to each customer (assuming most of this bandwidth is for TV service). The great thing about this equipment, as noted in the press release, is that they can upgrade it fairly cheap (atleast by Cisco standards I guess) to Gigabit Ethernet to each customer. My service is currently 10Mbps both ways. I actually have more like 12Mbps upload and 10Mbps download. The only problem with the service is they have a 40GB monthly cap, although they don't enforce it very strictly. The cap is kind of lame, but I guess if they didn't atleast institute the policy, then alot of people would heavily abuse it. Anyways, I hope more companies pop up doing stuff like this (other than the giants).

The fiber is in Sacramento, although not nearly the size of San Francisco or New York in overall population or density. They don't cover the whole city, but are expanding as fast as they can, even to areas where it might not seem economically viable at first. But this is in areas where there is heavy competition from both the local cable (Comcast) and telco (SBC) providers.