GigaOm

As someone whose first home broadband experience was a 256 kbps broadband connection from Verizon’s grammy Bell Atlantic, I have always retained a soft spot for DSL technology. Sure, I was jealous of my friends who got @Home cable-based broadband and its 1 Mbps service, but in Manhattan of the nineties, DSL was the only game in town. If you saw the cables in my East Village apartment block, you too would feel incredulous – how do these creaking, aging old copper wires bring fast broadband. As time went by, the speeds increased.

Cable broadband suffered from too much popularity — too many people shared an infrastructure and as a result the speeds delivered to the home were actually a fraction of what was advertised. And when I moved to San...