Not sure about Comcast, but in our area we have Bright House Networks as a primary competitor to FIOS. FIOS claims to be the only outfit utilizing LC-to-LC type fiber to their modems and 10 GBps fiber WAN, but in reality, Bright House, a cable provider, has an astronomically larger fiber footprint than Verizon ever will despite the client-side use of coax for connectivity.
Comcast probably has an expansive fiber network considering high definition channels require the bandwidth that only optical fiber can provide. If Comcast is as shitty as it was when I was in college, then they probably deserve what they get with this subsidization scheme.
My guess right now: Comcast loses their ass to non-paying welfare customers and goes begging the Fed for a handout.
Here Comcast is all coax cables and the technology is crap, you cant find anything with it's program search feature and it has no utility to create favorites personal TV guides to ignore channels of no interest (or you don't even get.) It is crap.
Verizon FIOS is designed to easily find both your channels and programs of interest easily and record them if you get a DVR box,