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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

But you don't want new pipes that can deliver twice as much water every few years.

No end customer has gotten any new pipes, certainly not at the rate Moore has provided for the ISPs. For them, networking equipment has gotten considerably faster, cheaper and easier to manage.

The technology is certainly not the issue here. The entrenched monopolies have all but guaranteed nothing happened in the last mile for 10+ years while their job got easier.

Just take a look around. There are very very few places in the world where you can get 100 MBit (and use it for more than a minute). This was the height of bandwidth technology in 1995. Today, 10GBit is the jellybean standard in networking gear.

I don't know if it was a typo or if I'm not understanding you correctly, but 100MBit is certainly nothing special in Sweden. Plus, I pay only about $50/month for it. Maybe instead of 'world' you actually meant the U.S?

I think there is too much emphasis on the last mile speeds. I see complaints all the time that other countries have 100mbit links to the home whereas the USA is stuck with 5-10mbit. Personally, I have 25mbit down and Fios is always trying to upsell me to 50. However, I never get those speeds to real internet sites. Sure, my speedtest comes in right at 25mbit.

To be fair, Verizon stopped the fiber game, so I'm not sure we're going to get new pipes from the big providers.

And as I understand it, one reason they did that was the threat of 'neutrality': FiOS only made sense financially if they could slowly turn a (numbers ballparked) $100 cable TV & phone bill into a $200 TV & PPV movies & games & video phone & PPV sports bill via "value-added" services. Neutrality would make that flatly impossible, though I think VZ figured out that even without neutrality, most of what they thought they were going to sell was going to be delivered over the IP connection by third parties anyway.

But they didn't start charging $200 for the service, they just stopped offering it.

That's a lot of money to invest on the hope that the majority of people will more than double their outlay on Internet connectivity.

Verizon stopped FIOS rollout because regulation made it unattractive. We were set to get FIOS in Wilmington. The government demanded Verizon build it throughout the city, which made no sense because most of the city is a ghetto. The government wouldn't budge and we got no FIOS.

As for water pipes: in many places they're a century old and leeching toxins into the drinking water. My wife worked on a project at Northwestern that studied this issue in Midwest cities. Outside a few rich cities, infrastructure like water is in terrible shape. Because there's not much profit motive in building dumb pipes, and the municipalities don't have the money to give much public subsidy.

Great. If they won't provide the service required, take away their license and give it to someone who will.

Yes, because we live in a magical world where companies are chomping at the bit to invest billions of dollars in heavily regulated industries for single digit returns.

Actually, we do. It's not that frequent, but the march of time has seen big changes in water quality, waste water treatment and waste water discharge strategies. Housing densities are increasing fast so bigger pipes are required (more bandwidth?). Dumping waste straight into the sea is no longer acceptable and mixing storm water and waste water is slowly being phased out and separate systems are now utilized. It's not exactly the same, but the dumb pipes that come and go from my suburb are slowly being smartened up. Auckland, New Zealand.

Why bother when they can just put the brakes on? It's not like there's much competition for any given city.

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