[Nrsolis]

My main point was to illustrate just how far we've come in absolute terms.

My second point was to point out that there are real reasons why the assumptions made about what broadband "costs" aren't really relevant to what you "pay" for it.

Without putting too fine a point on it, CAPEX on equipment/fiber tend to be dwarfed by the OPEX of leasing and labor costs associated with running a telecomm business for profit. Somewhat distended depreciation schedules mandated by GAAP compound the problem of removing obsolete assets from production networks and replacing them with newer equipment.

BTW, pricing for "Internet" has been "metered" almost from the beginning of commercial availability. UUNET did 95th percentile pricing for almost all of its dedicated access customers because that was the best way to tie consumption patterns to bandwidth availability.

If bandwidth seems expensive now, it's only because you've been paying for it for a very, very short time.

[nitrogen]

My first encounter with the Internet was on a 10hr/mo. dial-up connection with a 14.4kbps modem, and I'd been using BBSes before that. I definitely appreciate how far we've come :). Still, ISPs have reached the point where they're holding back technological progress to satisfy their own ends. Municipal fiber projects and independent ISPs often don't impose the same restrictions as the monopoly players, which suggests that it's possible to run a network without, for example, forcing Netflix to pay an extra fee on top of its existing bandwidth payments.

So does the extended depreciation force equipment owners to pay the taxes they would've written off for the extra years if they just disconnect the equipment and let it sit in a closet?

[Nrsolis]

How many municipal ISPs are there? Municipal fiber companies?

Careful. I used to work for a municipal fiber company and they are FAR from being the best group to build the kind of Infrastructure we need. Don't even get me started on the problem of politicizing the communications infrastructure of a city.

The only path forward is for us to get some real competition between the cablecos and the telcos.