-Just out of curiousity, it is possible that this could turn out in the end -to be a good thing for consumers? That after investors take a -well-deserved bath, someone else buys the assets for what they think they -will actually add to revenue after all the other necessary costs are taken -into account, so that some useful infrastructure ends up getting built -that wouldn't have if it was properly costed out?
In the long-term, that may happen, but that is "good for consumers" only in the fucked up economics of capitalism but irrational from any sense of moving forward decent infrastructure. This overinvestment in long-line capacity may be useful at some point but it is in many ways the least important part of creating high-speed access, since it doesn't matter how fast the backbone is, unless the same speed is attained in the "last mile" to the home or office. What we have seen in the last few years is massive insane amounts of investment in duplicative long-line capacity while starving investment in the high-speed connections to homes and offices.
For almost a decade, the telecoms have had this rosy vision of high-speed interactive connections, yet investments have been totally mismanaged, resources wasted and critical investments left undone, thereby making almost all the investments essentially useless for the vast majority of people.
Yeah, some will marvel at the "creative destruction" of capitalism but that's often just a code word for the irrationality of planning, where money is dumped down toilets and the bankruptcy courts whitewash the losses as the next round of "glowing reviews" of superstar companies emerge with cheap depreciated assets- all then noting how smart entrepreneurs were to succeed where government would have been "inefficient."
-- Nathan Newman