This seems like as good a place as any to complain that auctioning off radio frequencies to the highest bidder is unlikely to result in optimal (or nearly optimal) utilization of scarce resources, and is therefore working against the public interest.

I suspect that much of the demand for more bandwidth is really a demand for lower latency. It's not that there's a real need for 1Gb/s to the user. It's that the latency is too long under load. Some delay is being inserted by middle boxes near the end user with dumb FIFO queuing. This is sometimes called "bufferbloat", but it's not about how much RAM you have in the router, it's about big FIFO queues.

Just prioritizing empty ACKs in the upstream direction can help a lot. If you can't watch video while uploading a file, that's the problem.

Most bandwidth usage is ads and video. And bloated apps and web pages. What else needs much bandwidth?

Even HDTV only needs about 20mb/s, and can be compressed down to 8mb/s or so without much visible loss.

For a fun look at current fundamental limits on bandwidth I found this wikipedia page [0]. Really puts things in perspective.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_device_bit_rates#Bandw...

Google, FB, and Microsoft own cables. So I can see that it's data-intensive companies. What does owning the cable do for them? They get to rent it out to other companies?

Given the headline, I thought it was going to say "Comcast."

the size of your pipe is not the speed of your pipe. something I think few people understand.

better compression and less chatty protocols would certainly help with this issue but the overall solution is using superconductors instead of plain wires.

I raise my glass in salute to the day we all have hydrogen superconductors as our pop.

> the Internet is still a global patchwork built on top of a century-old telephone system.

No, it's not.

First thing I did was open the page and try to find the word "Comcast".