Question
Block-by-block broadband lottery in America, while peers moved on
We had an outage last month that turned into a three-day investigation because half our office could work from home and half couldn't. Not metaphorically—literally the same street, different sides. Meanwhile our London team's entire suburb had 1Gbps symmetrical and didn't understand why this was a story.
The infrastructure answer is obvious: we let cable companies build out their networks in the 1990s when fiber made sense, then subsidized copper indefinitely instead of ripping it out. Europe and Japan went all-in on public fiber, sometimes at gunpoint (regulation-wise). We instead created a patchwork where some neighborhoods got duopolies competing and others got whatever Comcast's DOCSIS network happened to reach. Once that geography solidified, fixing it became prohibitively expensive—not because of physics, but because the incumbents own the poles and have zero incentive to cannibalize their own customer base.
What bothers me more than the infrastructure mess is that we keep acting surprised by it. Every few years there's a new "broadband justice" initiative, some money gets allocated, projects stall, and we're back here. The actual hard part isn't laying fiber. It's that you'd need to either force the existing carriers to open their networks (they won't, litigation is cheaper) or build parallel infrastructure (expensive, fragmented, politically vulnerable when funding shifts). Korea and Singapore just... did it. They had state involvement and made it a utility question instead of a market question. We decided market forces would sort it out sometime around 2002 and doubled down when they obviously didn't.
I don't have a clean answer here. Just wondering if anyone's seen an attempt that actually stuck.
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I'd predict we'll get another round of federal money in the next 4-5 years, some of it will actually get spent on fiber in politically friendly districts, and we'll call it progress while the fundamental problem—last-mile monopolies + incumbent veto power—remains structurally unsolved. The infrastructure bill money is moving now but it's already clear the deployment is going to be wildly uneven because local politics and incumbent lobbying make some projects viable and others... not.
The thing is, you've basically identified why the pattern repeats: it's not a problem that needs solving, it's a problem that's tolerable for enough people that the political will to actually force change doesn't exist. London office works fine. San Francisco works fine. Some suburban tech corridors are getting fiber now because competition actually showed up (fiber to the home providers running their own networks in places like Reno, parts of the South). But most of America? We've all adjusted to the lottery. Your three-day outage is annoying but not annoying enough to override the sunk costs and regulatory capture. In my last job we just accepted that hiring in certain suburbs meant worse connectivity assumptions. That's not solving, that's adapting.
Korea worked because they treated it like an actual problem *before* the incumbents had 30 years of regulatory capture locked in. We're past that window. So my real prediction: this stays granular and distributed. You'll see pockets of good infrastructure, pockets of nothing, and the gap won't close systematically because the incentive structure doesn't allow it.
We're going to see pockets of this get solved via corporate self-interest before policy figures it out. Your London team's symmetrical gig fiber? That's happening in supply-constrained tech hubs right now—Austin, parts of the Bay, maybe Denver. Companies will fund the last mile to their office parks because the productivity argument finally pencils out against the cost. Starry and similar are betting on this. It'll look like the problem's being solved, locally, which will actually make the broader infrastructure question *harder* to solve because the political pressure from the worst neighborhoods gets diluted.
The actual prediction: we'll end up with a tiered system that nobody planned. Fiber to corporate campuses and wealthy suburbs. DOCSIS 3.1 holding steady everywhere else for another decade. Maybe some public fiber in cities where local governments got aggressive early (Lafayette, Longmont). The patchwork ossifies rather than fixes itself, and by 2035 we'll be talking about why symmetrical broadband is a regional asset differential the same way we talk about schools—something that just differs wildly by zip code and nobody's surprised anymore.
The part I'm less sure about: whether that's actually stable or if it cracks under its own absurdity at some point. In my last job we had to build our own microwave links for our remote office because waiting for the carrier was genuinely not an option. Once a few major employers do that math, the whole "market will figure it out" premise gets weird. But I've been wrong about inflection points before.