> Were you born into a world with electricity naturally occurring in sockets?

Massive swaths of the US required government action to get telephone and electric service. In many cities/counties, the city or county owns the power utility. In other rural/suburban situations the power utility is a non-profit cooperative that was encouraged/bootstrapped through low interest loans in the 30s and 40s. Telephone universal service was achieved because AT&T agreed to it in exchange for the government allowing it to be a (natural) monopoly

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ErroneousBosh 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Massive swaths of the US required government action to get telephone and electric service.

In the UK, British Telecom had plans to roll out what we'd now call "Fibre To The Premises", offering digital communications at maybe as much as 256kbps, multiple telephone lines, and even Video-on-Demand, by the middle of the 1980s across the whole country starting with rural areas.

However, it was smashed up and sold off in bits by the rapacious Conservative government in 1984. Now where I live is on track to get BT fibre - or fibre of any sort really - by 2034.

	▲	mixdup 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Telephone and data is an interesting one. It's an area that on its face is a natural monopoly, but in much of the US we ended up with two telecom providers Telephone was a monopoly because it doesn't make sense to have more than one company string a wire to every house and business. But, all that wire could carry until the 90s was a voice call Likewise, in the 60s/70s/80s cable TV became a thing but it didn't make sense to have more than one TV wire to every house, because it already has all the TV you can get, and at the time all it could carry was video channels In the 90s these networks converged: when everything is digital, a network carrying digital signals can carry any kind of data So, in urbanized and suburban areas we largely have a competitive market in what would otherwise be a natural monopoly. The problem is, because it's competitive in like 80-90% of the country everyone's been relieved of their universal service obligations (which applied only to voice service anyway) so there's been little incentive to expand into more rural and underserved areas