But when you start mass producing stuff it gets cheaper, and people work harder on making it robust for end users, more plug and play. You get equipment that adapts when the medium changes characteristics. You get a lot of things we don’t see now.

But there is a huge difference in what you get when you let people at the endpoints play with what they put on, and you let vendors create whatever they like to sell to customers, and you let tinkerers experiment than what you get when you have a provider and that’s all you have. Providers, especially monopoly providers, just think differently than customers and tinkerers. Their motives are different, their drives are different.

The innovation at the ends wins if you let it.

Now we could have gotten a lot of this with copper too, if the ilecs hadn’t had their own conflicts of interest. But at this point, if you were laying down conduits on the street, you would lay down glass, and I suspect glass will be a good thing to have under the street for a modestly long time — aeons in networking time. We’ll come up with something we want more than fiber in the 2020s, but by then we’ll have cheap robots to scurry down tunnels or crawl over poles and put the new new thing inside.