Mike Godwin says:
I agree about the potential for it to be free, but, I gotta tell you, the monopolists running the cable systems in this country have no inclination to share that nearly free bandwidth with you, even if you're willing to pay for access to it.
Wouldn't the solution then be to eliminate the capacity of local municipalities to grant cable monopolies? Fiber is compact -- five or even twenty cable companies could coexist happily in New York (where I live) if the city didn't grant "franchises", which it charges exhorbitantly for. With large scale competition between cable companies, monopolies would no longer be a problem.
In order to get to a world in which free markets can meet our demand for high-bandwidth connectivity, we have to dig ourselves out from the market-failure position we're in now.
Isn't the problem in question the result of government granted, rather than natural, monopolies? Isn't it thus wrong to call it a "market failure"? Seems more like yet another government failure. Perry