[bitwize]

> The government effectively established monopolies in phone service.

When the phone service was a monopoly in the USA it had five nines of uptime and close to zero latency.

It's been downhill since then.

[paulryanrogers]

POTS had massive costs to achieve that low latency. And it's quality over long distances was suspect. It may have also held back innovation because of bad regulation and inertia.