Why Comcast and other cable ISPs aren’t selling you gigabit Internet

500+ Ars Technica by Jon Brodkin

"Perhaps you should switch to another cable company… oh, that's right, we're the only one in town."

Viacom

Gigabit-class broadband is capturing the imagination of Internet users throughout the country. With Google and other companies bringing fiber-based services that deliver a gigabit of data each second to the home, communities are accelerating their push to get the highest speeds.
A consumer who really needs 1,000 megabits of bandwidth is probably a rare creature, but excitement over fiber deployments shows there is at least some demand for what is a ludicrous speed compared to most home Internet connections.
Cable companies haven't been ignoring this consumer demand… but they haven't done anything to satisfy it, either. Comcast demonstrated the "first ever 1Gbps broadband speed download over a production HFC [hybrid fiber-coaxial] network" two and a half years agoat the NCTA [National Cable and Telecommunications] conference, and the company showed off a 3Gbps technology at this year's cable show."Is there anywhere else in the ecosystem where somebody demonstrates something that's really cool and great, and faster and better, and doesn't put it out for more than two years?" Blair Levin, a former FCC official and current executive director of Gig.U, told Ars. "Would Apple ever say, 'here's a phone we're thinking about doing, maybe a couple years from now you'll get it. We could do it today but… no, we're not going to do that'?"

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