He said that no one would install new services in a neighborhood that required digging up buried wires. My whole neighborhood has underground utilities, so he suggested that we pay to have fiber installed in our neighborhood and work a deal out with ATT.
I don't think we will be getting it any time soon. However, because of Google and ATT here in Austin, TWC has announced (but not yet delivered) 300Mbps service, so competition does seem to be working.