[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.)