MIT Technology Review has a great overview of various fiber to the home projects around the country, and how they are threatening to break the chokehold of Bell and Cable monopolies. Essentially, a lot of the stuff is what I have been following here at my weblog.

bq. Why, then, are the little guys with much shallower pockets not just talking about fiber to the home, but building it? One reason is what I saw when I visited Elie two decades ago—rural areas have been left behind. Elie residents had party-line telephones, shared by as many as ten families, and could pick up three faint television channels from Winnipeg, 50 kilometers away. The fiber brought private phone lines, a dozen video channels, and videotex—the state of the art in 1982. It linked the middle of nowhere to the rest of the world.