[kentonv]

That doesn't seem entirely obvious, since last-mile infrastructure is a completely different beast from backbones.

But yeah, I clearly don't know what I'm talking about at this point. Sorry.

[nitrogen]

I think you understand more than you admit ;-). The last-mile infrastructure is indeed a completely different beast, and Verizon is last-mile infrastructure. So backbone-to-backbone might be symmetric, but backbone-to-last-mile should never have been expected to be symmetric.