re: #192 Love-Child of Cassandra and Sisyphus

That’s not how it works… Internet connectivity is a series of cheap wires and a lot of very expensive sparkly bits at the ends. A fast switch/router at the end of ten kilometres of fibre can cost fifty thousand bucks and without that switch the fibre is useless. Rural locations are expensive to serve, if there are only twenty customers on that 50k switch that’s 2500 bucks per customer up-front costs.

Those sparkly bits also need maintaining and regular upgrades and a billion dollars of investment in infrastructure made five years ago is electronic waste today, needing two billion dollars more money to replace it with something ten times better to meet ten times the demand.

I was an early adopter of a broadband connection here in the UK, super-fast 256kb/second down ADSL back in 2001 for about 50 quid a month shared between two flatmates, able to download Yahoo! webpages and transfer files (mostly pirated MP3s and ripped CDs). Today I’m getting 35Mb/sec down ADSL2 for less money per month, able to stream high-quality video without noticeable jitter while other traffic goes back and forth in the background. However I live in a city centre and the fibre cabinet across the street from my front door connects hundreds of customers nearby meaning the internet company can keep the price down and still make a good profit.

There’s a case to be made that internet connectivity is a human right, like postal service or free-at-point-of-use health care, a necessity in today’s civilised world. That’s something else but it shouldn’t be thought that providing it to everyone would be easy or cheap.