> From who? From someone? > I admit that "a few billion" which is clearly beyond what I was suggesting might open doors, but not by just signing up somewhere.

> From who? From someone? > I admit that "a few billion" which is clearly beyond what I was suggesting might open doors, but not by just signing up somewhere. Well, but what does "sign up somewhere" really mean? If you called a major telco and made it clear that you have a few billion to spend and you wanted a gigabit internet link, you don't think they would find a way? I mean, think Bill Gates calling ... you think he would have to do much more than order what he wants to get it delivered in a reasonable time frame? > Now sure, I could buy all the flats in the building, then leverage control of those flats to force the current owner to sell me the building, and then I'd have the right to get that work done. That means now I'm paying maybe £2-5M to get their merely "super-fast" broadband to my flat in a major city. Short of your "billions" but not by so many orders of magnitude... And really, you wouldn't have to do any of that. For one, you don't have to buy it, you simply have to tell them that you pay them a billion bucks to sign off on things, and secondly, the telco will happily do that for you. But also, they wouldn't have to sign off on anything. The telco could just as well install an LTE cell just for you, or a laser link from across the street, ... > A few billion wouldn't do much about that I think, you'd need tens of billions to buy that incumbent telco and "change their minds" about the priority of such bespoke services that way. Erm ... what's the yearly profits of that telco? What's a few billion in comparison to that? You don't think they'd take a substantial increase in profits for a few days of work for some of their technicians?