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US Broadband: Still No ISP Choice For Many, Especially at Higher Speeds (arstechnica.com)
Despite things getting better with adoption -- however slow -- of Google Fiber in several regions of the United States, the broadband market has gotten slightly less competitive since 2013, says a new report from the FCC. The report adds that, as a result, Americans still have little choice of high-speed broadband providers (PDF). From an ArsTechnica report: At the FCC's 25Mbps download/3Mbps upload broadband standard, there are no ISPs at all in 30 percent of developed census blocks and only one offering service that fast in 48 percent of the blocks. About 55 percent of census blocks have no 100Mbps/10Mbps providers, and only about 10 percent have multiple options at that speed. At the 10Mbps/1Mbps threshold -- which captures slower DSL technology in addition to cable and fiber -- about 90 percent of census blocks have at least two providers. These numbers exclude satellite, which is available nearly everywhere but has high latency and often low data caps. Even these numbers overstate the amount of competition, because an ISP might offer service to only part of a census block. The percentage of households with choice is thus even lower.
There's a good reason for this - broadband infrastructure is crazy expensive to build. Some of the incumbents received big government subsidies to build their systems, but those days are gone and new companies can't compete. If they stole customers from the incumbents everyone would go bankrupt because nobody can afford to build these systems and only pick up a fraction of the homes passed as customers. We need to have the government build the infrastructure once, and then lease space on it to any ISP who wants to compete. It's the only way that makes any sense and the only way that will ever allow any form of competition in this space.