[electric]

This is not a very good comparison.

Oil is a finite resource. You can increase infrastructure to get more but in the end there is no more than a finite amount of oil on the planet.

'Bandwidth' on the other hand is infrastructure dependent. Increase the number and width of pipes (or tubes! :) and you increase data throughput.

[jonmc12]

No resource is infinite. Technically, we could make more oil too. Just build some carbon lifeforms and give them the right environment for a few million years. In fact there is plenty of oil in the earth that we just can't get to because of the cost of retrieval.

The point is, once the cost of adding bandwidth exceeds the value to the market due to shortages of materials, energy, real estate, maintenance, etc you run into the same situation. Bandwidth availability has an s-curve like any other resource, and once you pass a certain threshold its just too expensive to add more pipes. It may not happen soon, but it will happen eventually. Its the same problem on a different time scale.

[robg]

An example of that S-curve today - my only possible "broadband" connection these days is satellite. And I'm only 100 miles from Boston.