Gigabit fiber is being rolled out in my area. It is amazing how quickly it is progressing compared to the work of Verizon or Google Fiber. So at least from that one example, there seems to be new players entering cities
Comcast just released Gigabit (over copper, DOCSIS 3.1) for all of Utah. It's only 40Mbit up, but I'm pretty happy with it. I thought it would take a lot longer.
This is exactly why cable providers have been so reluctant to spend huge amounts of money on FTTH. Squeezing more bits through existing copper infrastructure is a win-win situation for everyone.
But that doesn't scale. Gigabit speeds are possible with DOCSIS but that hinges on massively oversubscribing their last mile infrastructure and usage patterns to slowly increase. With DOCSIS, nodes can be huge and encompass hundreds of homes. The bandwidth available is shared with everyone on that channel in the entire node. For GPON it's similar, but nodes are somewhere between 16 and 64 homes and there's even more bandwidth available.
ISPs aren't letting congestion get to record levels to YouTube and Netflix because they want to screw with you, they're keeping the congestion "contained" at certain peering links because that cuts down quite a bit of the amount of aggregate bandwidth they have to deal with at the last mile. If they upgraded their peering links then they'll just cause congestion for everything instead of just video services that will gracefully degrade to worse quality in the face of congestion.
Moving to FTTH is a win-win situation, ISPs get a break from the endless struggle of keeping the last mile free of congestion and customers get something closer to net neutrality since the ISPs don't have perverse incentives when it comes to peering agreements.
