Handwaving away all the additional utility seems unfair to me. These pipes are a lot fatter, more accessible than ever before, and there are many more ways to u

Handwaving away all the additional utility seems unfair to me. These pipes are a lot fatter, more accessible than ever before, and there are many more ways to use them. Working from home, eliminating shopping trips, telehealth, video calls, online banking and bill pay, podcasts, maps, music, gaming, the list goes on and on. If you're "cord cutting" and not paying for cable TV anymore, then you likely still come out ahead even after folding a couple of streaming services into the mix. If all you have are 1990 expectations, then you should be able to make do with something for about $50/mo, maybe less. Either a cheap phone plan, or entry level internet and VOIP. And it'll still be leagues more useful. That private phone line you shared could only be used by the one computer in the household, if there even was a computer, which more often than not there wasn't, and when it was online, you couldn't take phone calls, which was more of a problem than now, because it was 1990. And we don't live in fear of our telephone bills like we used to. We don't charge long distance, by the minute, or per text. Data caps are annoying, but they're not life-changingly expensive, and hey, if you're living it up like it's 1990, you'll never get anywhere close to exceeding them anyway.