A better analogy is airplanes and air travel. We have the technology to build supersonic passenger jets, but the economics don't work: leisure travelers are unable/unwilling to pay more for their ticket to get at their destination two times as fast. Their time isn't valuable enough to justify the added expense. Yet, business executives are willing to pay for supersonic business jets because their time is that valuable. Supersonic private jets are already under development.
Consumers would love faster broadband, but they can't afford to pay more for it. Businesses can, and they have a variety of options available.
If Google's roll-out significantly more expensive than any other type of facilities-based build-out?
In fact Google's product is rational: If you are going to bother to build out in a competitor's territory, you want to get all of your competitor's customers to switch, so you need a disruptive product.
My understanding is that the new build out is cheaper than traditional HFC builds. The difference here is incumbent providers would need to abandon large swaths of their infrastructure to compete with a disruption play in Kansas.
Google is spot on to roll out FTTH, but existing plants aren't going to disappear any time soon, and likely will not react to the disruption play at large.
Actually, the Concord was operated profitability for several years mostly though a dramatic increase in ticket prices which there customers did not really care about.
Market research had revealed that many customers thought Concorde was more expensive than it actually was; thus ticket prices were progressively raised to match these perceptions.[36] It is reported that British Airways then ran Concorde at a profit, unlike their French counterpart.[127][128]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concorde
As to network capacity, it's actually fairly cheap, prices are based around perceived value not cost just look at text messaging plans. That and cable competing with hulu/netflix.
An even better analogy is that the companies that build airplanes also build cars. They have a decent margin on cars but a much lower margin on airplanes. So, even if they could make planes that were larger and faster, they profit more from keeping people driving their cars.
Consumers would love faster broadband, but they can't afford to pay more for it. Businesses can, and they have a variety of options available.