[exelius]

There's no technical capacity limit, that's true -- but there are operational and financial constraints. Replacing a half million routers across the country to remove the previous technical constraints isn't an easy or fast thing to do: the hardware will be obsolete before the implementation is finished.

Think about everything that goes into this: they can't just pick a piece of hardware off of Amazon; they have to review proposals for companies to manufacture and support the hardware over their 10-year lifespan. They then have to train their employees on them, develop migration plans, rollback plans, schedule maintenance windows, etc. These migration plans often involve significant changes to CPE configurations, which also need to be planned, tested, implemented and trained for.

It's a huge infrastructure. It costs a lot of money to make any significant change. And you seem to be confusing Ethernet with a last-mile technology; it's more of a last hundred feet technology. A lot of the effort over the last 10 years has been spent moving the telecom-owned equipment closer to consumer homes so that faster speeds can be obtained over shorter cable runs. As the length of a cable run increases, so does interference and you have to dial down speeds as a result (this is even true of fiber, albeit to a lesser extent).

[revelation]

I'm painfully aware of just what lengths telcos will go to to press the last bit of (downstream) bandwidth out of the taxpayer funded land line infrastructure they have been gifted. Thats what I'm saying: they have no interest in investing. Who will wake them up and tell them that no, you can't bridge another 20 years of progress on fucking bell wire? Do we like send them postcards explaining the Shannon-Hartley theorem?

But the terrible state of last-mile technology in the field isn't even what this is about. Netflix servers and the intermediaries they peer with are not in a shed in Nebraska with data coming in over microwave. Telcos don't invest in the last mile where they would have to create actual infrastructure, they don't invest where high technology rules in the heart of data exchanges all over the world.

(Of course ethernet isn't the relevant benchmark here, but at that time it wasn't just about what you could do over a hundred feet of copper, but also at what speed systems could actually communicate.)