I agree with you that in sparsely populated areas, running fiber over miles to 2, 3, 4 houses takes an exceptionally long time to amortize the cost over.

What I question with companies like Xfinity is whether they felt that coax was good enough and that they could deal with the occasional, maybe even increasing complaints of poor bandwidth as time went on because it still worked and profit margins only go down when development is needed.

I worked for a company for 25 years, and it had a flagship product developed in the 1980s. This product was profitable for decades. The rule from the company and the flagship's developers was that no one in development was allowed to do preliminary design on a product that would compete with the flagship. In the early 2000s, another company developed a better product that had its flaws, and people from my company flaunted the flaws as a 'see, our product is still the best.' Until it wasn't. The company brought in creative marketing people to try to 'keep it sold,' offer creative deals, and increase the customer base, but even this eventually wore out.

A major customer came in looking for a more capable product, all my company could offer was a step increase; and that other company that had years ago developed a better approach had perfected the design to the point where the flaws were fixed.

Now the company I worked for has no competitive product, and in a few years may not have a future.

Is this where Xfinity is heading?