When home Internet service costs $5,000—or even $15,000
When Cathy Corman bought a house in 1998, she didn’t mind that it had no cable service. Corman was finishing a dissertation, her husband was starting a new job, and they were raising five-year-old triplets—they didn’t spend much time watching TV. And to get on the Web, all they needed was a phone line and a dial-up Internet subscription.
But years passed and dial-up Internet became a quaint memory for most Americans. The cable industry that gained its dominance by offering TV service became the top provider of high-speed broadband. For most of 2016, Corman’s house still didn’t have cable, fiber, or any access to reliable, high-speed Internet service despite its location outside of Boston in densely populated and affluent Brookline, Massachusetts.
Corman, a university lecturer and journalist, needed fast Internet service, and the local cable companies, RCN and Comcast, were offering it to nearly all of their neighbors. But for reasons that weren’t totally clear, her family’s house had never been hooked up, and the cable companies wouldn’t wire up the house unless the couple paid for all of the necessary construction and permitting.
