[Empact]

For all the people despairing, I see plenty of reason to hope, and it comes in the form of wireless broadband. The hardware is getting quite powerful and inexpensive - for a few hundred bucks you can get a pair of dishes that will push a half gigabit, e.g. https://www.ubnt.com/products/

Basically anyone who can get locate a solid urban fiber backbone can build a network off it, in the same way that https://www.monkeybrains.net/ is doing in San Francisco.

There's no reason a city can't support multiple competing wireless line-of-sight networks, given that they don't face the same high infrastructure cost of wireline service.

[tacticus]

Except there is still a very limited amount of bandwidth in the air. Yes you can get 2 dishes that support half a gbit of traffic but you only get 4 or 5 of those up and running without interference. you still have significant scaling issues.