Cambridge, Maskachusetts turned down a fiber-to-the-home deal with Verizon FiOS roughly twenty years ago. Rumor had it that Comcast was funding some pet projects for politicians and, therefore, Verizon couldn’t get authorized to compete with Comcast (not yet “Xfinity”).
As part of the process of unloading my old condo in Harvard Square, I tried to figure out if fiber-to-the-home had become available without me noticing. The answer is “sort of”. More than 90 percent of the city is remains a Comcast-only (Xfinity) territory. But the city has provisioned symmetric gigabit fiber to city-owned public housing apartments. Those entitled to public housing pay $35/month for Internet that those who pay property tax could only dream of having. (It might actually be free for those who refrain from working; there is a Digital Equity Plan to relieve people of this $35/month and multiple full-time “digital navigators” get paid to help those who don’t work maximize their enjoyment of free or near-free Internet.) Jesus pointed out, “The last will be first, and the first last” (Matthew 20:16). This translates to “gives [public housing] residents access to the highest internet speeds available in Cambridge at the lowest cost.”
The person who pays $100/month in rent (including utilities) gets faster and more reliable Internet than the person who lives in a $10 million house on Brattle Street and pays property tax. The taxpaying chumps will get hit for $100/month by Comcast for comparatively terrible service.
What does a person who hasn’t worked for four generations do with Gigabit fiber? Streams multiple movies and sports games in 4K:
What do Cambridge officials work on besides keeping their tax cattle in an Xfnity ghetto? Mayor Sumbul Siddiqui was born in Pakistan and might have enjoyed fiber-based Internet there if her family hadn’t chosen to enrich us here: “Fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) internet is growing rapidly in Pakistan, with over 2.6 million subscribers as of February 2026.” (Google AI). City Hall was hosting a “Sexual Assault Awareness Month” event instead of a “Escape the coax ghetto” event:
Here are some of the shirt-based messages:
The one with the Star of David was almost next to a sign showing that future Cambridge residents will be, like the current mayor, primarily Islamic:
(Note the nod to the native-born Blacks in the background. Their lives matter and also they have already been replaced by migrants (see Replacement of Black workers by migrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts from MLK, Jr. Day 2026).)
Why would the mayor highlight sexual assault instead of the monthly assault of residents paying high prices for inferior Internet? Wikipedia says that her family never got out of taxpayer-funded housing (Rindge Towers and Roosevelt Towers; sometimes enrichment by migrants means native-born taxpayers have to pay for the migrants’ apartments for 20, 40, 60, or a few hundred years (multi-generational)). So, from her family’s perspective, Xfinity’s monopoly and decades-old infrastructure is irrelevant.
(Note that folks in Maskachusetts don’t seem to be serious about discouraging what we now regard as sexual misconduct. Age of consent is 16, which means that everything Jeffrey Epstein is established to have done would have been legal in Boston. (He admitted to some sort of sex act with a 16-year-old.) It would be almost impossible to prosecute an Epstein imitator in MA because he could raise the “she consented” defense.)
Thanks for the post. Interested in your thoughts about Frontier hitting a passenger on the runway recently. Seems to be big news!
Pilots tend to have tunnel vision regarding the centerline when taking off. The “pilot monitoring” is watching the instruments so as to be able to say “thrust set”, “100 knots cross-check”, “V1”, “Rotate”, etc. After ATC clears a plane to use the runway it is tough to imagine anyone being on the runway so it doesn’t surprise me that a random person availing him/her/zir/theirself of the “no human is illegal” principle wouldn’t be noticed by the crew.
“Frontier hitting a passenger on the runway”
I guess that’s not as bad as a stowaway freezing to death in the wheel wells or getting sucked into the engine.
> I guess that’s not as bad as a stowaway freezing to death in the wheel wells or getting sucked into the engine.
Or getting on the wrong side of a stew-with-a-tude.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/fly-with-me/
FYI, there is no truth to your premise that Cambridge turned down a Verizon FIOS deal 20 years ago. This is an urban legend that persists. The city has no involvement (or regulatory remit) with telecom companies who wish to run fiber for communications vs. twisted pair copper. The reason Verizon never wired Cambridge or many other towns/cities is that, following a multi-year period of FIOS installations in multiple regions (including in towns that abut Cambridge, such as Belmont), they halted new installations after concluding the large capital investment to string fiber wasn’t generating a good ROI. Looking back, this was a very poor long-term decision because they essentially gave up large markets to other fiber competitors and/or (more recently) players with fixed wireless internet (particularly T-Mobile), yet they are now saddled with the eroding and expensive-to-maintain copper network in places like Cambridge.
I could write responses to the t-shirts, e.g. “Doesn’t the other lesbian’s arm get tired?”, but I’m a feminist and completely immune to Phil’s taunts. “No means no”, unless it’s on the ballot.
The urban legend is not that Cambridge prevented VZ from stringing fiber (not laying it because Maskachusetts doesn’t believe in underground utilities). It is that Cambridge wouldn’t allow VZ to offer cable TV in competition with Comcast, thus denying VZ a sufficient revenue opportunity to justify the capital expense.
ChatGPT: “Cambridge did oppose Verizon’s 2006 effort to shorten/streamline the Massachusetts cable-franchising process. A June 12, 2006 Cambridge City Council resolution said Verizon had filed a rulemaking petition with the state Cable Division and that Cambridge opposed Verizon-proposed licensing timelines; it argued the existing license timetable was fair and reasonable.”
(Let’s assume “the existing license timetable” for VZ in Cambridge was “never”)
Verizon makes little to no money selling cable TV to FIOS customers, given the programming costs they incur from content providers. Like all high-speed providers, they make all their profit on the internet connection. The attachment rate for TV among FIOS customers is ~30%. So, 70% of FIOS customers reject their TV packages because they aren’t priced well and instead opt for buying just internet, then, if they want TV they buy TV from over-the-top (OTP) providers like YoutubeTV or Sling. Cambridge has no jurisdiction to regulate internet connections via fiber or OTP providers in Cambridge. Verizon could have installed fiber in Cambridge (there was no regulatory roadblock, despite what you seem to imply, and this is in fact confirmed by the fact that the Cambridge government is installing it for low-income grifters for a subsidized rate), but as I noted Verizon independently chose to essentially discontinue adding FIOS everywhere (including Cambridge) for a period of many years until recently when they have again decided to resume growth.
CF: I believe that you’re correct about cable TV having turned into an albatross (AT&T ditched it). Twenty years ago, however, I remember VZ saying that they couldn’t recover their infrastructure costs unless they also sold TV. VZ sought a cable TV license from Cambridge and, had they been immediately granted it, would presumably have then fibered up the city. They didn’t give up on the FiOS buildout until some years later. (Separately, here in Florida the unionized AT&T can’t lay fiber in communities in competition with non-union Hotwire. It might be a similar situation. Non-union Hotwire cheerfully offers gigabit Internet plus 333 channels of traditional cable TV for about $75/month (bulk rate through an HOA) and recovers their cost of digging after 5-7 years. AT&T’s costs are apparently so much higher that they can never recover their costs.)
So to avoid capital gains tax & retain some connection to the fatherland, this means Greenspun will soon buy another property in Boston as a summer/FAA ground school home.
lion: Your idea is a great one. If I could get a Cambridge Housing Authority 3BR ($125/month including utilities) with gigabit fiber (another $35/month), I would take it. Sadly, however, Cambridge is not at its best during the Florida K-12 summer vacation, which is our primary time to travel. That’s end of May until mid-August. There are very few university-run events in the summer. Music and theater in Boston are lame compared to in NYC, but they’re essentially non-existent in the summer because the ticket-buying elites have fled to Maine, Cape Cod/Islands, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the Berkshires (because Cambridge is often unpleasantly hot in the summer).
Unburdened from A/C repairs, should be able to get a couple of nights in Motel 666 Cambridge.
Thanks, OAG. Fortunately, most of my friends in Maskachusetts are aircraft owners with grown-up kids. So that leaves plenty of guest rooms in their respective houses (invites so far to Beacon Hill, Back Bay, Brookline, Cambridge, Lincoln, and Belmont). One characteristic of the Righteous is that they almost never downsize, unlike Floridians. They’ll just stay in (and heat!) their 4,000-6,000-square-foot house for decades after the kids are gone.
I was looking at relocating to Washington State, and I asked my sister-in-law if I could stay in her barn. I told her although I’m idle, I’m not rich. She said she’d love to have me but the barn burned down. Didn’t even offer to let me tent camp on the ashes. Must be nice to have friends, I went to the free-loading well once too many times. (I am glad that I didn’t cause the fire with a carelessly tossed roach in the hay.)
I should contribute something besides terrible jokes today, starting with the next one. The answer to fiber to the home, as with everything, is socialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longmont,_Colorado
> In May 2013, the Longmont City Council voted to finance and build out its own municipal gigabit data fiber-optic network, known as NextLight, to every house and business over a three-year period starting in late 2013.
It was actually dark without drops to houses for a while, mostly emergency traffic. Then I guess it took off and became well-rated:
https://www.techdirt.com/2023/05/31/community-owned-broadband-network-again-tops-list-of-most-popular-isps/
> And despite industry lobbyist efforts to paint these networks as some kind of socialist boondoggle hellscape, locally owned community ISPs continue to be extremely popular.
Laramie, WY had a Pringle’s can ISP that was better than the big-boys cable operation, and took a lot of propaganda abuse by the monopolists.
> I should contribute something besides terrible jokes today,
The shirts do kind of read like setup for jokes, comically home-made, about a non-funny topic. I have a home-made protest shirt I made with a sharpie. It’s weed-green, with “4/20 4all”. I sometimes wear it around the MAGA parts of town. I haven’t been beaten up for it yet, although the guy with the 13 star flag is catching on. I mostly wear it on 4/20, MMJ Awareness Fortnight, and No Kings rallies. It isn’t on display in my yard, due to HOA regulations. My thought was that wife beaters usually had mustard stains on their A-shirts, the “I didn’t say NO…” T-shirt looks like they were into the beer and pretzels too, and left some on their shirt.
I’m strongly against domestic violence. I’m also against stupid, pointless slogans worn on the sleeve, bumper, or chest. And furthermore, I’m saturated with witnessing idiocy. I wish WP had an “exclude topic” buttons, and would heartily click “Cambridge”. There’s no sense beating a dead horse, either.
> I’m also against stupid, pointless slogans worn on the sleeve, bumper, or chest.
With all due respect to your “4/20 4all” agitator shirt bro. Peace.
> With all due respect
None taken.
> I’m saturated with witnessing idiocy.
That’s just the slogan T’s doing their job, sir. Payback for giving us all Trump Derangement Syndrome…bwah, ha, ha, ha…excellent. My nieces would call Cambridge “cooked”, BTW.
> My nieces would call Cambridge “cooked”, BTW.
Like their barn? I don’t really think that barn burned, NH, if you know what I’m sayin’. Check Google Maps. How about “chopped, sus, and non-rizz” to describe Cambridge?
Well some refugees living their “dream life” need section 8 housing and gigabit fiber so they can train as first person shooters. People who go to meetings all day don’t have the same bandwidth needs.
https://nypost.com/2025/11/27/us-news/inside-american-dream-life-of-alleged-dc-national-guard-terrorist-as-neighbors-reveal-dramatic-fbi-raid/
I first read “to play first person shooters”, as in games. But your joke is a bit darker. Nice.
Ordinary Average Guy,
It’s not a joke.
https://x.com/boston25/status/2053947248124289462
Shocking new video shows a gunman opening fire indiscriminately on Memorial Drive in Cambridge. Police say there is no current threat to the public but the incident has shut down the usually busy road for hours on Monday afternoon.
> It’s not a joke.
With all due respect, which is a lot for Phil’s commenters despite my tone, it is absurd to the point of being a joke, a very dark one.
I get the seriousness killing sprees, I mean, like “duh”. However, when they are rolling out fiber (the point of this article) I think the intent is for (possibly multiple, concurrent) people to stream movies, work from home, watch lectures, news, even play FPS games for entertainment — not enable mass murderer training sessions. When the Internet was nascent, we could never imagine such things — I guess other than people like Philip K. Dick. I do understand and agree with your sentiment, though, about the underlying story. Thanks for the feedback, Steve.
As for this new clip: “The paper holds their folded faces to the floor. And every day the paperboy brings more.” (Brain Damage, Pink Floyd) Every day is some new horror you couldn’t even conceive previously.
> Shocking
Meh, it’s kind of hard to shock someone already in a state of absurdity-driven catatonia, such as I am. My original “Internet connection speed” up/down was 300 baud to the mainframe. Now we’re paying $100/month for 500Mbps, and I could see Phil’s images being drawn one line at a time due to rain interfering with my WiFi (long story) — back to 300 baud. I don’t think I would shocked, awed, or even surprised if my house in Boringville, USA was hit with a drone strike overnight. In the remaining millisecond of my life, I would probably think, “That was rather not unexpected, rather not,” and wish that wherever I was going would have 8 Gbps actual speed up/down. Not joking.
> With all due respect, which is a lot for Phil’s commenters despite my tone
We love you too man. I miss Fake Obama and Fake Hunter, where did they go? Can you keep a secret? They actually are The Real Obama and The Real Hunter, they tell the truth we hide from you. The fakes are in Martha’s vineyard and camping on an ash pile in Malibu.