said by insomniac84:The first person into a new market always has an advantage. They at any time could have offered gigabit without caps and negotiated deals with the city for any regulatory breaks. They chose not to.
Someone else beat them to it, now they lose. Notice how they are not taking advantage of google targeting a single city by immediately offering gigabit without caps in other cities using existing infrastructure to negotiate deals.
In this case, the late mover has the advantage of lower network gear and fiber costs, as well as not having a workforce and farming everything out to largely non-union, lower paid workers.
The legacy infrastructure that the telcos have is a disadvantage because they can't easily ditch their copper plant because some phone services don't work over VOIP.
Since the phone service is regulated for them, makes it hard to ditch some of the existing plant.
Google has an inherent advantage over cable/telco in that they are willing to build their own gear and do custom things to reduce costs/improve performance - the cable and telcos only buy gear and pay someone to install into their network.