hansschmucker: So, the cities sign contracts that prohibit new competitors from working in an area that's already covered by another provider? This is getting better and better.
DarrkPhoenix: Oh, if you think that's good just listen to this one. Back in the mid 1990s there was a push to get high speed broadband connections rolled out to the entire US. As part of this plan, a deal was entered into with most of the major telcos: they got some changes to state laws that were favorable to them, as well as $200 billion in tax breaks and other incentives, and in exchange they were supposed to lay fiber all across the US so that most households would have a 45 Mbps symmetric connection by 2006. The telcos got all of the tax breaks and law changes as planned. Now, who here from the US has anywhere even close to a 45 Mbps symmetric connection? The telcos pretty much just pocketed all the money and did nothing, and now we're getting complaints from them that they need to start throttling connections and introducing bandwidth caps because people are using too much of the 3 Mbps asymmetric connections that they have, and their infrastructure just can't handle that.
