It will be interesting to see what happens in the broadband space. Copper is expensive to maintain and has distance limitation. Its only positive is the ability to deliver power making backup easier. Fiber has virtually unlimited capacity but is very capital intensive with payback periods longer then senior management or Wall Sweet are interested in.
The various flavors of wireless are great but I think they are only going to be practical in fairly rural areas. Even with aggressive frequency reuse it is going to be hard to support locked up mult-megabit speed for everyone, in addition to the proliferation of handheld devices.
We were able to electrify the nation and provide phone service to everyone during the 1930's but it does not look like we have the political will to do the same thing today for broadband.
And the government formed orgs like the TVA because the privately operated utilities have said the same thing as broadband companies are now. "Rural America is not profitable"
What I find funny about this statement,Frontier was developed for rural districts. Frontiers soul agenda is to deploy DSL or Fios to rural areas has been since there inception. Verizon was my phone company for 20 yrs and always promised DSL never delivered when Frontier took over it was up and running within 1 yr. As long as Frontier has rural areas like my when there is no other isps they will stay in the game. Frontier made this 13 state deal to deploy Internet.