"Choose to" is a very interesting choice of words seeing how the vast majority of their market is that they are they only option and people have no choice.
Most places in the US have at least two wired options, and two or more wireless options. And, if Comcast charges too much, and cities allow it (as with Google Fiber), other options will arrive.
I call BS. I live in a suburb of San Francisco and have a choice between Comcast and 5Mbps DSL. In other words, I have no choice whatsoever because my telecommuting (and Netflix and Hulu and...) need higher speed bursts than that.
And these are still better options than my family in the Midwest and New York have available to them. You just can't claim with a straight face that there's competition in this market.
Minneapolis is a beacon of hope, here. $40 for 100 Mbps / 100 Mbps in much of the city, from a local fiber provider.
That's what kills me. Comcast's audacity is just so much more galling when you've actually experienced what happens with competition. And not that competition is a panacea, necessarily. I don't have a say in my water, gas, or electricity providers, but in exchange for that monopoly, they're subject to pretty serious regulation.
Indeed, let's make everyplace like Minneapolis, or Google Fiber cities, by fixing each local market with new options.
That's much better than nationally locking-in a pipes-and-sewers-like regulatory structure that freezes incumbents into a safe but slow-moving regulated approach, for decades.
The decades of Title-II-regulated AT&T telecom monopoly were not good for consumers or innovation. They were safe and slow.
You have two wired options, which is exactly what I said. (You can't call 'BS' if your facts are consistent with my claims!)
I have 5Mbps DSL in San Francisco. It's plenty for HD Netflix and Hulu, VOIP, and video-calling.
I suspect you also have 3+ wireless options, some of which likely offer 20Mbps+ in bursts. Yes, it costs more. Yes, you'd like to pay less. Everyone would! But your desire for more modern luxury goods (massive HD bandwidth), cheaper, is not a public policy crisis.
Someone has to invest more to give you more, and market-floating prices for the existing paths are exactly what draws in more investment – or sends you a signal that you should 'self-help' to the nearest source of plentiful bandwidth.
The road my Dad lives on has no cable lines because it would apparently be unprofitable for Comcast to run them. This was told to me by a manager I somehow was able to get on the phone more than 10 years ago, and it is still that way out there. Comcast has an exclusive monopoly to service that road but choose not to. All roads connected to it have Comcast lines and the nearest line is less than a half mile away. He is too far away for DSL and other such options. His only choices are Dial-up and unreliable satellite (trees around yard).
I understand he is an exception, but it is not nearly as uncommon as you are implying.
So yes, your father's property is an unfortunate outlier. His main beef should be with the local authorities who granted Comcast a monopoly without a prompt requirement-to-service.
(And in places where Comcast is truly the only provider, local regulation until other options arrive makes sense. Just not nationally, when almost everywhere has 2+ wired options and 3+ wireless options, and could also incrementally add new wires and towers far more easily than outlying/non-urban places.)
