I want to reply on the linked threat from the original article.
It talks about Sweden but the fact is only some of the municipals have their own fiber networks even though 12-13 years ago a go from Sunet suggested that one would build fiber to everyone just like the electronic grid and that the price would be a reasonable 50 billion SEK.
Sadly ADSL and cable modems started showing up and I guess the government retards and old fucks was to weak and stupid to make it happen.
It was of course a very good and much better idea than anything else.
Instead they built fucking TV antennas for digital TV (and will be upgrading for digital radio) and are still stuck with the old telephone network. AND people have less competition and quality on their Internet connection and not the same amount of options everywhere.
In the linked article someone make the lame excuse that the US have so many people whereas Sweden only have the population of New York and hence it's not comparable.
But it's all about density of the population. To be fair though US have larger cities and hence in-between them maybe more open space.
On the other hand IN something like NY there's no reason you couldn't have what Sweden have in Stockholm for instance.
Also someone compared with California which have got four times the people in about the same amount of space but shouldn't that just mean that there's better possibilities of doing it in California? An even larger city or more densely populated area = less to dig.
In the case of Sweden those 50 billion would be 5 000 SEK / person = $600 but that's NOTHING!
Having a fiber network is a long lasting infrastructure piece and having it built everywhere and others compete for providing bandwidth for consumers likely lead to much better price for them. The nationwide network would lower prices on Internet connection and over time $600 is really cheap.
And as said it could be used for stuff like TV, radio (possibly), telephony and things they may not want to do now because it's not as obvious that everyone got an IP connection (government and municipal service, health-care, declaration of taxes, banking, ..)