America's fast broadband is going nowhere fast  - meanwhile Canada is investing CA$ 1.75 billion to connect 98% of Canadians to high-speed internet by 2026.

 

Nothing that currently exists can compete with fiber. Nothing replicates the future growth fiber networks will deliver, simply because nothing that moves data has the inherent capacity of a fiber wire. It isn’t even close by any technical measurement. However, barely 30 percent of Americans have access to fiber infrastructure, despite the fact that 100 percent of Americans have become dependent on high-speed access during the pandemic.

 

In a few short years, more than one billion fiber-to-the-home gigabit Internet connections will have been deployed in Asia. That fiber infrastructure will be capable of reaching symmetrical ten gigabits, 100 gigabits, and well into the terabit era of broadband access in a cost-effective basis as applications and services continue to evolve and advance. Deployment at a large scale is possible, but the U.S. still lags far behind.

 

Here is how bad our high-speed access market is today: every big American ISP has stopped deploying fiber services at any serious scale. This leaves a vast majority of Americans stuck with inferior cable Internet service. When you factor in the monopoly power held by the ISPs—preventing Americans from switching to better service—it becomes a perfect storm. That storm broke with the pandemic, where we all suddenly found ourselves needing quick and reliable Internet access.

 

Only small private and local public providers are connecting folks to the future, but their efforts are stymied by incumbents and not sufficiently supported. That means most people can’t switch from cable when they opt to throttle uploads or are unable to deliver the speeds they’ve advertised if we all use the Internet at the same time. You still have landlords getting away with keeping fiber competitors out of apartment complexes in exchange for a kick back from companies like Comcast.

 

I think New Zealand is doing well.