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While Comcast does offer higher speeds, it's prohibitively expensive. In a typical market where Comcast has an effective monopoly the 2Gb service is $300/month and even just 250Mb is $150. Their upload speeds are also pathetic, the 250Mb service is only 30Mb up.

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For comparison, I pay 50€/month for 200/10 Mbps in Germany (including some phone / TV service that I don't use)

I pay 34€ a month for 100/100 Mbps in Portugal, including TV and Phone too. And that's because I missed the promotion for a few days or it would be 25€/month.

Yes, the 2G service is expensive (it's also delivered over 10G fiber, rate limited on the required router), but their 1G service is more reasonable (i saw $140 on http://www.xfinity.com/gig-offer ), not sure what the upload is, and availability is meager, of course.

The question is whether it's symmetric speeds and in-metered. Asymmetric speeds with caps is a fantastic way to offer 1Gb speeds with almost none of the real benefits or innovation opportunities.

Those are symmetric(!); the real killer is the contract duration, the installation/activation fees (up to $1000 total), and the installation time frame (up to 8 weeks).

The 2G is symmetric, but I'm not sure about the 1G

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