This is a debate in the industry with wide-ranging implications. It basically boils down to will we have a wireless future as the primary means of Internet deli

This is a debate in the industry with wide-ranging implications. It basically boils down to will we have a wireless future as the primary means of Internet delivery or will we not? And there's no clear answer. Sure 5G (even 4G) is fast but could it handle, say, all of Manhattan using it with no fixed line Internet? I have my doubts even with the 5G focus on concurrent connections. Or if it could it may just suck a lot of the time. Wired (particularly fiber) has many distinct advantages: 1. The lifespan of the infrastructure is like 30-40+ years, possibly much longer; 2. Once you have the fiber in place it's pretty easy to change the lasers at either end and boost the speed, likely to 10Gbps+ if required; 3. Fiber unlike wireless doesn't suffer from interference and the amount of data you can get down a conduit with all the fiber strands you can fit is simply gigantic. But of course wireless doesn't have the massive upfront capex cost that a fixed-line network does. As much as people (reasonably) deride the US cable industry, high speed Internet pretty much exists in the US because of riding the coattails of the infrastructure that was built in the latter part of the 20th century. Who knows where we'd be without it? If you had to build that infrastructure from scratch today the cost would be astronomical. This isn't unique to cable or telecommunications either. It seems like in virtually every Western country the cost of infrastructure has ballooned to the point where many things that exist now would just be uneconomical to create now (eg rail and subways in major US cities) and that's going to be a huge problem going forward. Of course this isn't a binary problem. The future may be a hybrid (eg wireless last-mile). As for your point about cable companies fighting competition at the regulatory level, absolutely true. It's not a simple issue however. As much as cable companies are desperately fighting commoditization (they don't want to be the provider of dumb Internet pipes), an overbuild with a fixed-line network doesn't make much sense either economically. It's why we only have one water network, one gas network and one electrical grid (per region; many in the US have this deluded view that regional monopolies are somehow "competition"). It's also why utilities are highly regulated as they are monopolies. It's also why ISPs need to be regulated as a monopoly. Internet is the so-called 4th utility. But this regulation will prevent naked price gouging. It will however impact the cost per kWh and ultimately regulators will have to relent to let them raise prices to cover costs.