New York Times: Cheap, Ultrafast Broadband? Hong Kong Has It #broadband #fiber

A New York Times article Cheap, Ultrafast Broadband? Hong Kong Has It by Randall Stross reports that a Hong Kong ISP is offering gigabit residential service at $26/month.

From the article:

Inexpensive pricing of gigabit broadband is practical in American cities, too. “This is an eminently replicable model,” says Benoit Felten, a co-founder of Diffraction Analysis, a consulting business based in Paris. “But not by someone who already owns a network — unless they’re willing to scrap the network.”

In the United States, costs would come down if several companies shared the financial burden of putting fiber into the ground and then competed on the basis of services built on top of the shared assets. That would bring multiple competitors into the picture, pushing down prices. But it would also require regulatory changes that the Federal Communications Commission has yet to show an appetite for.