RE: An Explanation of the State of the Internet Infrastructure in the United States
This is a great post!
I have known some things about this for awhile due to technology being in my field of work to.
A lot of states have monopoly electrical grids that are complete crap, and new companies are not allowed to start up because the people who approve permits to new electrical companies are the government(who denies the permits so they maintain a monopoly). Not only that, but there are now a lot of non-profit schools(yes I am serious, and it isn't a government or state run school either) and non-profit electrical companies who have monopolies in rural areas. They pay no taxes, instead what they do is continuously buy more land and give everyone huge raises at the end of the year. The only reasons these things exist is due to government created monopolies that stand in the way of technological progress.
Where I am living there has been some laws passed in recent years though to make things better, there actually is an electric choice now and 4 or 5 internet providers(used to be 2 or 3 depending on what part of town you are in).
We have in Denver one electrical provider. Xcel Energy.
We in reality have to internet networks. Comcast or CenturyLink.
I do want to qualify. We have a choice in Denver from MANY internet providers. However, due to the last mile being either CenturyLink or Comcast then all the other choices are using part of their own network and then reselling the last mile of one of those two. This is actually how it works pretty much everywhere in the country sadly. Places where communities started their own internet (rare) or where Google got their Google Fiber in it might be different. There are also some places where you can get microwave wireless internet that also would change this, but these are not that common. And yes Satellite is still there too which works pretty much anywhere but it still suffers from that high latency issue.