Networks require a lot of care and feeding in the form of maintenance of the wire plant, day to day management of DDoS attacks and routing table errors, upgrades to switching centers, manual re-routing, the replacement of DSLAMs and CMTSs, and compliance with DMCA take-downs.

Computer manufacturers simply operate tech support centers and send out replacement units when failures occur under warranty.

Moore’s Law ensures that high-end parts are increasingly powerful and low-end parts are cheaper. High-end CPUs cost as much as they ever have, and that’s probably a more meaningful insight. Moore’s Law doesn’t impact the cost of the Comcast truck or the technician who drives it.

How about a little more analysis and a little less emotion?

Open, competitive and horizontally oriented infranets/exchanges in the lower, middle and upper layers would achieve this performance. Getting there is going to be a challenge. We were on our way until 1996 when we passed the well-intentioned but farcical Telecom Act. Then came special access deregulation in 2002 and equal access abnegation in 2004. Bandwidth price/performance has improved only 6-10% on average as we’ve remonopolized the sector(s), even as technology and demand scale point to a 30-50% declines (using 802.11 as a competitive proxy).

Bandwidth is 20-150x more expensive than it should be depending on where in the Infostack one is. Google Fiber best illustrates this as they approach the model horizontally and price to reflect marginal cost at every layer and boundary point.

Its anecdotal … but I am paying slightly more for a much faster connection. I think others probably have similar experiences.

Computer electronics are very cheap when mass produced. More expensive CPUs are not more expensive because they cost more to make, but instead because they are produced in lower quantities. Try buying an outdated form of computer memory and see what that costs you.

Installing a broadband system is mainly labor intensive. And it’s also somewhat labor intensive when the system is upgraded and expanded. That doesn’t get cheaper over time.

That changed over 15 years ago if my memory is correct.

Kinda in the south kinda not. Anyways, I’ve heard about fiber for years and the cost associated with it. If I could have fiber service.. like for 50 dollars a month, and I got like 50/50MBPS and I had to pay 2500 dollars or sign a 5 year contract with the companie, I’d do either to get better internet service/speeds/latency resolved. I’d do it tomorrow. And 2500 hundred dollars is a lot of money, but hell for the 25 years+ I’ll live where I do, it would be worth it.. These companies must not even be thinking 10 years long term investment. Its garbage.

Also I have TimeWarnerCable, they bought out newwave who was my provider, a decent company honestly, compared to charter who owned the cable lines before them….