But if the Bell doesn’t put it in place they CAN’T pay for it. And it’s not like the phone company can really do partial upgrades. So many of the upgrades are entirely in the building, and the customer can’t really choose whether or not to pay for it. It’s not comparable at ALL to cars, it’s most comparable to ROADS. The phone system is a BACKBONE, it’s upgraded or it’s not.
Railroads were privately owned, but publicly funded. Especially when they decided to make the transcontinental.
Our railroad system system. It’s not the envy of ANYBODY. It’s hands down the worst rail system in the civilized world. It might be the envy of Viet Nam, but everybody in Europe LAUGHS at our rail system, it’s a sad pathetic joke that’s major technical evolutions behind.
Amtrak doesn’t resemble what I’m recommending for telecommunication. Amtrak resembles what WE HAVE RIGHT NOW in telecommunication: a complete dysfunctional system forced upon us by a stupid government. The government built Amtrak and broke AT&T, they should have left both alone. AT&T was working, we had the best phone system on the planet, now it’s a pathetic joke. The de-evolution of our phone system is the proof positive that the breakup was bad.
I think you're looking at the highly dysfunctional passenger rail system in the U.S. and assuming that it is representative of the freight rail system. They are not the same, they are operated separately, and they have completely different business models.
Freight railroads and telecom companies face very similar challenges in their business models. One big one -- which is the main point in this discussion -- involves the enormous capital expenditure up front to build the infrastructure. It's true that the transcontinental railroad was "publicly funded" to a certain degree, but that was more of a function of the legal structure of the country at the time, and was also part of a business deal between the U.S. government and the two railroads that constructed the "transcontinental" segment of the line (from Council Bluffs, Iowa to California). The railroads couldn't do business out West the way they did in the East, because most of that area was not even organized into U.S. states at the time. The government underwrote bonds and gave enormous land grants that would have been worthless without the railroads running out there anyway. The bonds were eventually paid off, and the U.S. government maintained discounted pricing and scheduling priorities for military transportation as part of the deal.
Regardless of how the railroads were originally constructed, the business model today is built on private ownership and financing of capital expenditures. It's probably the most capital-intensive industry in the U.S. today. The rails themselves get replaced every 12-30 years, depending on how much they're used and on the type of track section ... curved track wears much more quickly than tangent (straight) track, for example. And that's just a small part of the capital expense of a railroad. The Union Pacific, to cite an example of a Class I railroad, has a fleet of 8,500 locomotives -- and these things cost about $2.5 million apiece. Do the math, and that comes to $21 billion in locomotive assets alone.
But somehow the railroads manage to do all this profitably, which tells me that nothing stands in the way of the telecom industry, either.
There's one big difference between these two industries that makes it much more challenging for telecoms to operate profitably: almost every customer of a railroad company is another business, while telecom industry has 300+ million people who are also customers to a certain degree. This presents enormous problems because these customers have an expectation that they have a God-given right to inexpensive phone service. This makes it difficult for any private company to operate profitably because the customers have no idea how much it costs to actually build and maintain the systems they use.
I don't see how a monopoly arrangement would do anything to fix that problem.