Guess I'll cut cable TV - $$$$

[hunter]

17. Not here in California. There's no phone service required if you can find a local provider.

AT&T maintains the copper wire pair to my house for some fraction of my internet service fees, but they are not my internet service provider.

When I first got internet service in this house (beyond pokey dialup that never approached 56kbit/s) neither Comcast nor Pacific Bell offered consumer level internet service. At best Pacific Bell call center people would bounce you up to their business services offering expensive fractional trunk or ISDN lines, but mostly they hadn't a clue. Internet? What's that? Huh?

I'm probably just lucky to live in an area where higher speed Internet Services were established before the phone and cable companies could monopolize them.

My wife's parents live in a rural place where AT&T wireless or satellite is the only option. They have AT&T wireless. A single Microsoft Windows update can blow out their data limits for the month, and even if they did pay for higher data limits, it's still unlikely Netflix would work.

My parents live in another place, like ours, that enjoys independent internet services, even though it's fairly rural.

We could have inexpensive high speed internet service for everyone in the U.S.A. if we wanted it.

Too bad the telcoms own our politicians.