> Saw some good news though - last year internet speeds increased nearly 40% in the US.
This is within the "Moore's law applied to network hardware" range and is not unusual.
It's also somewhat misleading because of how they're measuring (mean download speed), because customers have recently been abandoning DSL for (faster) cable. But if a 10Mbps DSL customer switches to 20Mbps cable, it shows up in the numbers as a 100% speed increase even if the cable network is no faster than it was before, or is faster than before but by significantly less than the 100% they're getting counted as.
In other words, it's claiming the destruction of competition as a consumer benefit because the market share loss of the dying competitor brings up the average.
What makes you think it's competition that's dying. Verizon has been rolling out FiOS to more areas, so their previous DSL subscribers are now upgrading to fiber.
Citation on Fios expansion? AFAIK, they've been holding steady with their existing mid-atlantic footprint (DC, Maryland, Delaware, PA, NJ, NY), and sold off everything else to Frontier in 2015. I believe their reasoning was that they could offer 4G to areas currently served by aging DSL lines, so there was no reason to upset the shareholders by spending money on physical infrastructure for fiber expansion.
This is within the "Moore's law applied to network hardware" range and is not unusual.
It's also somewhat misleading because of how they're measuring (mean download speed), because customers have recently been abandoning DSL for (faster) cable. But if a 10Mbps DSL customer switches to 20Mbps cable, it shows up in the numbers as a 100% speed increase even if the cable network is no faster than it was before, or is faster than before but by significantly less than the 100% they're getting counted as.
In other words, it's claiming the destruction of competition as a consumer benefit because the market share loss of the dying competitor brings up the average.