I'm fairly sure that Huffpo piece is misinterpreting the context of universal fiber service. The statutory "minimum for universal broadband availability" was "

I'm fairly sure that Huffpo piece is misinterpreting the context of universal fiber service. The statutory "minimum for universal broadband availability" was "1.544 megabits per second (Mbps)" in 1996 when Verizon claimed it would increase it to 45Mbps. See 6 Pa. C.S. §3002. 1.544 Mbps is a T1 line. This strongly suggests that universal broadband availability isn't talking about residential mass market, $49.99 dollars a month, but instead, was about about replacing trunk lines. They weren't promising to give every house 45Mbit. They were promising to upgrade T1 lines to T3 lines, which coincidentally operate at 44.736 Mbit/s. This is confirmed by the time frame of these claims. 45Mbit for home house would have been seen as insane for 1996. 56k modems hadn't even been released on the market. AOL had just introduced flat rate pricing. Home networking didn't really even exist. I'm not even sure if FttH was a concept then. Fiber termination was still very expensive (still is really).