> No. And the reality is that IP connectivity is not much different to these other utilities.
I understand where you're coming from, but it is different. You have ample power to power your home; utilities can fulfill whatever your power requirements are.
The same can't be said about IP. I am literally incapable of live streaming from my parents house, no matter how much I'm willing to pay. There's no internet option, among the few available, that are capable of fulfilling my requirements.
Yeah no need to explain the situation because I started my own ISP 16 years ago because I bought a house in Montana that the telco assured me could get T1 service. But they lied, so I had to build my own wireless ISP 10 miles out from the nearest town to get service. And to justify the investment in upstream and equipment I decided to serve the "underserved" businesses in town. Been there, have the T-shirt.
Consider the analogy further : if you built a house in a place with no power line, you would expect to either not use much power, or to pay a hefty fee (10's of thousands) to get power brought in. But folks expect to get Internet capable of streaming Netflix 4K (on two screens concurrently) for $50/mo.
I agree with you that rural-broadbandification will be as important as rural-electrification was in the '30s. That said, I think that most lucrative (read: capital efficient) business model here is low-bandwidth web sites, not high-bandwidth ISPs. Does a news site really need to ship 2Mb of JS, a 20Mb auto-play video, and 5Mb of ads to communicate 1.5Kb of plain-text? Maybe if your users have fast connections but not if they're in rural Idaho and it takes 2 minutes (that's 2,000 milliseconds) to load a single page.
I understand where you're coming from, but it is different. You have ample power to power your home; utilities can fulfill whatever your power requirements are.
The same can't be said about IP. I am literally incapable of live streaming from my parents house, no matter how much I'm willing to pay. There's no internet option, among the few available, that are capable of fulfilling my requirements.