http://www.vox.com/2014/10/31/7137457/broadband-speed-chattanooga-kansas-city-lafayette
God bless the free market.
ISP services should be a public good. The corporations currently overseeing it all have shown that they are not up to the task.
This achievement is really impressive when you consider that Chattanooga, Kansas City, and Lafayette aren't even remotely as dense as Seoul or Hong Kong or Tokyo, which get similar speeds. When we put our minds to it in this country, we can do great things. And what works for Chattanooga could work even better in bigger cities like Chicago or Miami.
But there's a catch. The American cities that are delivering best-in-the-world speeds at bargain prices are precisely the cities that aren't relying on Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, Time-Warner, etc. to run their infrastructure. In Kansas City, Google built a state-of-the-art fiber optic network largely just to prove a point. In Chattanooga and Lafayette, the government did it. . .
So even though we have the technical ability to deliver cheap, super-fast internet and we have the financial ability to finance the construction, we don't actually have the network. In fact, we're so in hock to the interests of the broadband incumbents that we don't even use all the fiber networks we've already built.
God bless the free market.
ISP services should be a public good. The corporations currently overseeing it all have shown that they are not up to the task.