Is there enough demand already generated in industries requiring significant network throughput (e.g. e-sports, industrial IoT, or elsewhere) that ISPs will shoot themselves in the foot if they collapse the market? I personally don't use enough data to justify a Gigabit connection. My friends who stream video and game online might. Hopefully the latter will pull us into the future, but I don't know for sure.
I can answer that: they won't. ISPs showed they have the capacity to expand and improve and bring better service to people when they're challenged to do so, but it is equally obvious that they give not two fucks about anywhere they have no competition, which is basically everywhere.
The Google of the past that did cool stuff was our one ticket to disrupting this bullshit and getting it fixed, and Google the corporate big business machine of today killed that hope.
And if you think it'll get better as other parts of the world continue to pass us by, all you have to do is look at our health care system to see how that works out.
That doesn't seem to mean anything when all the company cares about is next quarter's stock performance.
When I moved to Seattle, Verizon had recently abandoned its fiber network there, and my neighbors were so mad about it that they didn't trust any ISP.
I tried to Google it, but Big G disappoints. Perhaps someone who lived in Seattle (especially the East Side) and remembers this can shed some light on it.
If anything, Verzion plowed a ton of money to run fiber to most homes, then saw poor uptake and a small telco they could dupe into taking on massive debt (Frontier). This has forced Frontier to offer good deals like 200Mbps/200Mbps for $40 a month. Centurylink in the city proper starts at $45 for 40Mbps/5Mbps via fiber, and Comcast is $30 plus fees for 60Mbps with a 1TB cap.