What I was hoping to see in this article but didn't (and maybe some HN folks have good ideas on this) is how do we fix it?
The most expensive part is the "last mile" or hooking individual buildings up to the grid. What I propose is that the Federal government build fiber to each and every public school and university.
From there, leave it up to the individual state, county, and city governments to see if they want to front the real cost, which is the last mile.
You could even make it like the New Deal and only hire chronic unemployed workers (unemployed >6 months) and train them to lay the fiber. These newly trained workers can then be hired by the local governments who choose to complete the last mile from the national backbone.
It would at least give the unemployed work, the schools access to information, and let the rest of us to decide whether or not to pay the real cost.
In the '90s, Iowa put down* fiber that runs right through our town, and these companies were able to tap in and offer it, first to businesses and in a central area, and then later to any homeowner that wants it, thanks to a grant to offset the cost of installation (but only if they offered service to the entire town, probably less than 20 square miles). I pay $70/mo including a local phone number and the money stays local.
Then fewer people would believe these articles about "why you will never get fiber" - arguably that's false, since it is only necessary to move to a city that has it.
If the '49ers moved to California for gold, it's not so far-fetched to have a mass migration away from these backwards, oppressive places that still only have high prices for slow speeds.
The result is that the entire service area – which consists of mostly farms, and some small town areas – have had DSL connections for more than a decade and they have been working to roll out fibre to those locations for the past few years.
If the citizens are going to pool their money to build infrastructure anyway, what advantage does the government model bring over the co-operative model?
Luckily, there is some decent competition in the wireless internet space. As technology continues to improve there, more people will have access to decent internet speeds wirelessly and the wired infrastructure will feel pressure to catch up. Hopefully more options for unlimited data plans will also become available in the near future.
As far as the absurd amount TV providers are charging for HD TV, DVR services and the like. Technologies like Netflix, Hulu, Apple and others are providing more internet-based services that provide this type of On-demand service at a much more reasonable price. I hope more content will become available on these types of services as more people realize how much better of a user experience it is over watching normal network TV (even with DVR).
So - I guess another question might be, how do we make Community owned broadband an attractive option across the country?
The US is a big country but it's not the problem of sprawl/distance/density or any of that stuff. The problem is that the US is essentially made up of fifty states that each have their own laws and regulations. Even then these states are broken up into counties (or equivalents) that may also have their own laws and regulations. Now toss in there the different deals and contracts that the different companies have with each of these entities. There's a reason why one neighborhood only has provider A while the next neighborhood down only has provider B.
Granted, there are things like this on the federal level too.
At some point it'll probably take an act of Congress to get the courage to say that the current system is not acceptable and detrimental to the country's future. What will probably have to be done is some kind of mass movement to convert the system to some form of municipal-based service similar to electricity and water in most areas. But even that system doesn't work out well for everybody.