and the nearby city of longmont did the same thing, and it hasn't gotten the people anything, last i checked. (not that voting for it was a bad idea; i'm largely ambivalent.)
digging under ground and laying cable is significantly more expensive than most people realize, and when they get the quote, they're suddenly a lot happier with 100Mbps.
comcast probably didn't fight it because it doesn't matter. or they figure they can lease some, and it'll be that much less they've got to bury for their business customers.
This is not true. Longmont has proceeded with building out a fiber utility for its citizens [0] called NextLight. As I mentioned in another comment [1], my understanding is that Boulder city has required private telecom operators to lay city-owned fiber alongside its own.
ok, so starting 3 days ago, some people are maybe getting something. that's a lot better than i expected, but let's be clear to folks not clicking the link, the whole city isn't magically rolling in gigabit, and won't be for some time yet.
"Digging underground is expensive" isn't that justified, it always depends on the environment in which you're digging.
In city/village areas with roads, shitloads of existing cables and pipes it literally can take days to dig a trench deep enough to bury a telco cable pipe (here, 60cm below ground minimum - most electricity in the 230VAC level is also at this ground level, 20kVAC and water are deeper in most cases) due to all the cable crossings.
In rural areas you can usually just forget about cable crossings and easily do hundreds of meters a day (we call this "Bodenrakete" aka ground rocket).
(I'm working as a digger and technician in Germany for the current 100mbit/s-in-the-fucking-desert campaign)
digging under ground and laying cable is significantly more expensive than most people realize, and when they get the quote, they're suddenly a lot happier with 100Mbps.
comcast probably didn't fight it because it doesn't matter. or they figure they can lease some, and it'll be that much less they've got to bury for their business customers.