[n4r9]

Unwittingly a brilliant demonstration of how short-term capitalistic behaviour hamstrings society. Japan, Korea and Hong Kong are way ahead of the UK and much of Europe precisely because of the lack of insight and vision reflected in your post.

[qcnguy]

Ahead in what sense? More successful internet startups or tech economy? I don't think so, but that's how such buildouts were pitched as justified.

[n4r9]

Ahead in internet speed...

[qcnguy]

Which is a means to an end, not an end in and of itself... UAE has higher median home bandwidth than the USA but nobody is claiming UAE has somehow uniquely benefited from that.

[n4r9]

You're not making much sense. Faster internet speeds are obviously good for society, all other things being equal.

[qcnguy]

No they aren't. I don't buy the fastest internet available to me because it costs a lot more and none of my computers would be able to use it without special upgrades. If I did for some reason upgrade, nothing would get faster because bandwidth isn't the bottleneck for anything I do, latency is (and latency is mostly server side). Most people are in that situation in the country where I live. FTTH can deliver more bandwidth than there is demand for.

I mean, come on. This is HN. Aren't we supposed to be engineers here? Increasing bandwidth only matters if some useful activity is constrained by the lack of it. You can't just say more of X is always a good thing, for any X. Ignoring tradeoffs is the mistake that creates leftism, but there are always tradeoffs.