Most would-be providers of bandwidth to consumers are guarding legacy premium bandwidth sales. The phone company would like to sell you differentiated phone ban

Most would-be providers of bandwidth to consumers are guarding legacy premium bandwidth sales. The phone company would like to sell you differentiated phone bandwidth at 10x market rates. The cable company would like to sell you differentiated TV bandwidth at 10x market rates. One approach would be to unbundle internet from premium bandwidth services offered by the same company over the same channel. Suppose the US was organized with a tier of companies competing to offer you cheap, reliable bandwidth, and a tier of companies competing to offer you premium services riding atop that bandwidth. Other countries have a model similar to this, and they generally have much better bandwidth services. In the US, we're tied to legacy investments in carrier infrastructure that make moving to such a system very difficult. Personally, I think we should just pay them off and start fresh. Unfortunately, that ends up basically looking like nationalization, which in the US is extremely difficult politically.