A competitive rental market is something that rarely exists. In most of the cases I've heard of, the demand is much greater than supply, so the landlords are free to charge whatever and if you don't accept, there are 100 other people in line for the same apartment.
Here in Seattle, whenever one of my intern friends would move in, we would first tell them to look for apartments with wave/condo internet. 60$ a month, no contract or installation fees for 100 Mbit per second internet. It hasn't gone down once in that past 4 months nor ever slowed from that speed (I can also spend an extra 20$ a month to get 1 gbit per second).
