Can College Towns Lead the Way to Giagabit Broadband ?

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How college towns could lead the way to gigabit broadband
An academic group is organizing privately funded residential fiber networks.

"Until recently, America's major telecommunications firms always had plans on the drawing board for the next generation of Internet connectivity. In the 1990s, when most people connected to the Internet using modems with speeds of 56kbps or slower, phone and cable incumbents were working on cable and DSL services that would offer connectivity measured in megabits. As households upgraded to those first-generation broadband services during the aughts, incumbents were hard at work on technologies like FiOS, U-Verse, and DOCSIS 3.0 that would offer broadband connections in the tens of megabits.

But now, for the first time since the dawn of the commercial Internet, there are few plans in the works for major network upgrades. Most American households have no reason to expect that they'll see another order-of-magnitude increase in broadband speeds any time soon...."