All that went away when I switched to Longmont's municipal service. System wakes up, internet's instantly accessible.
I tried CentryLink's 1MB DSL prior to Comcast but the latency was always shit with it. If my room mate was doing anything, I could see ping times in the 1 second range.
I can also transfer my founding membership with my house if I ever sell it, which is a pretty sweet deal for anyone who wants to move in here.
Longmont has run the numbers and thinks the municipal broadband can be profitable. I'm curious to see if they can maintain the speeds once 20,000 people are on the network, but I've also heard them say they think they can do that too. People who get on the bandwagon early get discounted rates as long as they keep the service. After a few months the prices will go up a bit for new subscribers, but they're still going to be very competitive with other services.
Congress will likely forbid this technology in the USA, lest it interfere with their favorite past time.
I've been watching the idea since the early 00's. I've been on teams that have adapted the processes to work for the team and have been very successful doing so. I've seen a team get a cadence going and become extremely accurate at estimating new work for a product the same 5 people worked on for 5 years. During that time they also dramatically improved the quality of the code, reducing crashes that required weekend coverage to almost 0. Every once in a while they'd adjust their processes if things weren't working smoothly. Teams can work very effectively in an agile environment, if they're actually allowed to.
If you follow the evolution of agile, you see a lot of key concepts that get repeated over and over. The guys who wrote it understood that code is never perfect and never really correct the first time you write it. It pushes unit testing as a core component of the process. As with other things, making mistakes and correct them teaches you something about the problem, and so the whole process is designed around uncovering those mistakes quickly, throwing code away and rewriting it and constantly improving quality. The philosophy of most companies is that the developers should just crap something out that kind of works and then move on.
What it basically comes down to is just because your team is agile doesn't mean you can hire chimpanzees to write your code. Or manage the team. If you're looking for a silver bullet that will fix what's wrong with your company, agile isn't it. It enforces much more discipline than whatever crappy process you were using before that, but you really have to understand what it's about, and most people don't.
"Little else matters than to write good code." -- Karl Lehenbauer