I would think that any many decently populated areas, it's at least a "duopoly". You would have the cable company and the phone company competing. I have a choice between Comcast and AT&T.
This is a short-term situation that is already mostly dead. The pre-existing infrastructure of POTS and CATV wiring was re-purposed to provide Internet connectivity. But the last-mile POTS infrastructure is completely saturated and xDLS services cannot compete against DOCSIS. Comcast can upgrade you from 20Mbps to 1Gbps by replacing the box down the street and selling you a new modem. AT&T has to dig up the street and run new cables through the walls of your house to accomplish the same.
POTS still has alot of life left in it. It just hasn't seen any investment. Long-term it could handle greater overall capacity given each household has a physically dedicated line to an aggregation point.
Phone companies just need to invest in putting the DSL modems closer to the households, say at the neighborhood cabinet rather than the switching station. A literal mile is too far. VDSL2 can do 100Mb/s in each direction at 500 meters, and there's no bandwidth contention with your neighbor. And VDSL2 is extremely mature, hardly the state of the art. By comparison, at the office I pay $450/month for dedicated 100Mb/s fiber service from Cogent. And the POTS infrastructure is just about as reliable--which is to say, very reliable.
I live in San Francisco, which is already extremely dense. AT&T owns the POTS system, but they refuse to put in the investment. My switching station is almost 2 miles away. I finally got fiber from Sonic.net. They're investing in hanging fiber over much of the westerner half of the city at a time when AT&T is hemming and hawing about upgrading their cabinets. And interestingly, my fiber service runs straight to that switching station 2 miles away.
The only reason cable dominates is because the phone companies aren't interested in competing. AT&T and Verizon own a huge amount of the POTS infrastructure, but are entirely focused on mobile and cable. It's a ridiculous state of affairs having so much infrastructure managed by the same oligopoly. When I cancelled Comcast and told them I was only paying $40/month for Gigabit fiber there was a long pause--he was absolutely incredulous. Was it a promo price, he asked. (No.) He knew there was no chance of retaining me as a customer.
VDSL2 is great for the areas where most of the customers are already close enough to benefit. But outside of urban areas, you're still proposing almost the same degree of disruption to the neighborhood as a full fiber deployment. Instead of digging up the road and my yard and putting new cables into my house, you're now merely digging up the road and putting new boxes in every fifth yard. And all to offer downstream service that is almost as fast as what the DOCSIS provider currently delivers, and upstream capacity that most customers won't see much benefit from.
The dedicated last hop bandwidth of DSL sounds nice, but in practice the shared nature of DOCSIS usually isn't a problem and when it is the solution is no more expensive or invasive than what DSL requires up front for every neighborhood.
The vast majority of Americans live in neighborhoods far more dense than that, even deep in the suburbs. I can't find the figures for America, but according to this presentation 100% of Europeans live within 500 meters of their distribution cabinet: http://www.wik.org/fileadmin/Konferenzbeitraege/2007/VDSL-Co...
I agree DOCSIS has been good enough. But with the shift to services like Hulu and NetFlix I would argue that it's nearing a threshold. And even if it weren't, I bet if a telephone company had somebody as highly motivated as Elon Musk, they'd be able to eat their local cable company's lunch.
AT&T is not interested in delivering video over wires. They want to move customers to DirectTV as quickly as possible. There is no marginal cost to deliver video over satellite to an additional customer as far as Infrastructure.
Same as the other child comment. Every locale I've been to has had at least 3 choices with an occasional 4th: a cable company, a phone company, and a satellite company. The 4th is typically a very small, local ISP.
The cable company has always had the most bang for the buck. It's something like 60Mb down at about $1/Mb. The phone company is the underdog that gets you from under the thumb of the cable company at a lower speed. It's something like 25Mb down at about $1.50/Mb. Satellites are basically a last resort. I can't recall speeds, but it's abysmally slow at a high price. That's nothing new though.
The local ISP is something that I've always wanted to go with, but they never have the speeds. It's always some form of ADSL capped at around ~15Mb down and ~1.4Mb up somewhere between $1 to $1.50/Mb down.
Your two real choices are cable or phone company, and if you go with the phone company, you pay more for less while still under the stranglehold of a large carrier.
I have gigabit internet from AT&T - $70 a month. On my best computer I routinely get 900Mbps+/900Mbps+. No data caps, no extra fees.
Even in the few areas where Comcast does offer 1Gbps they still only have 35Mbps up stream. It's the cable companies that are being left behind by fiber deployments.
Verizon stopped deploying FIOS to new cities in 2010 and entirely in 2015. Since then, they've begun building out in Boston, but future plans are unclear. AT&T has been deploying new fiber, but that was a condition for them to acquire DirecTV. It's a long way from being an option for most Americans.
It's not really a choice. AT&T in my area of SF is still crap compared to Comcast.
So yes, I could choose to use AT&T, but I would be getting substantially worse service. All cities should be investing in building out infrastructure themselves, as it would increase the desire for companies and people to live and work where they have better connectivity.
Cities have no money. All across the country, they're insolvent and drowning in pension and other liabilities.
SF is flush right now, which makes it particularly outrageous that it doesn't invest in infrastructure. But SF's behavior also tells you how cities got so deeply in debt with nothing to show for it.
A number of cities have tried to build fiber networks only to be thwarted by ISP lobbying at the state level. Some had their eyes on Google Fiber. SF is studying municipal fiber, although I don't know how seriously.
E.g. in Maryland, nothing precludes Baltimore from building its own broadband network. It just has no money. Ditto Chicago, or New York. The laws applying to Philadelphia or anywhere in California shouldn't really stop construction either.
The only place in the city residential FTTP is an option (other than to larger apartment buildings) is, AFAIK, Sonic's FTTP trial in the Sunset.
The NIMBY is strong in San Francisco. Apparently, even the imposition of the above-ground junction boxes are too much for people here, and so, once again, "We are why we can't have nice things."
Even — if not especially — in a place like San Francisco.
My choices, where I live, are Comcast and DSL (I'm just out of LoS for Monkeybrains). So I give Sonic money every month for a pretty hideous dollar:bandwidth ratio, comparatively, because that's still better than Comcast, in my book.
