And, for most purposes, modest (e.g. 25 Mbps) is all that most people have any need for. Admittedly, I don't have a house full of people using high bandwidth services, but my home 25 Mbps and my work connection are subjectively pretty much equivalent. Maybe if I'm loading big files from somewhere that isn't throttling me, but I'm certainly unconvinced I should pay Comcast more for something faster than my current connection (which I could if I wanted to).
In my building we have FiOS and Comcast. In Baltimore, Verizon doesn't have a video license, just internet. But it's 50/15 for $50/month, and I always get 50/20.
One day, the ONT on my floor went out and nobody noticed but me. Apparently, I was the only person on the floor (of dozens of apartments) to subscribe since the building was built 5 years ago. People on HN like to believe that what the market really wants is a fast dumb pipe for watching Netflix/Youtube, but it's a fantasy world.
The reality is that there's little money in the dumb pipes. The money is in content: in Comcast's case video content, and in Google's case, web apps and ads. Existing cable networks are plenty fast enough for video, so Comcast doesn't bother upgrading. They're not fast enough to enable the future Google envisions, where you store all your content "in the cloud" (and they datamine it to sell you ads), so they're building fiber. It's that easy to understand.
