People always like to say private roads are impractical, but that is 1970&#x27;s thinking. Today all we need is a common standard for toll readers like most states have for their internal highway toll system, and people could drive on toll roads and be automatically billed, and your GPS can factor in the toll costs in your travels (just as they do now - in most GPS navigation apps, you can elect to avoid toll roads).<p>The comparison to utility lines is not particularly relevant, though. If I want to travel over a road, I just need to bring my car and do it once. If I want to run gigabit fiber over phone poles, it is building a road <i>on</i> a road - the fiber cable is itself a road, build on the infrastructure transit center of phone poles.<p>The more apt comparison is that I want to send data over said fiber channel - it is the functional equivalent to wanting to drive my car along a road, the only real difference is the marginal cost of that traversal is so insignificant on the fiber line (the cost of beaming light along it in a fixed data path) that you may as well disregard it, whereas cars have significant per-distance and per-usage costs associated.<p>But roads and coax &#x2F; twisted pair &#x2F; fiber lines are really great comparisons to roads. They have usage limits, they can become congested, but when they are underutilized they are effectively wasted. It seems like something private enterprise would actually be good at, if not for the fact possessing the road or cable line grants yourself an untenable market position giving yourself a monopoly. But public transit authorities demonstrate very poor ability to adapt to consumer demand for expanded roads where there is great congestion, because they aren&#x27;t profiting off road traffic and are not incentivized directly to fine the maximum tradeoff of value against consumer satisfaction - there are many degrees of separation between the funding of road construction, the maintenance of the road system, and the consequences of your &quot;customers&quot; being dissatisfied. Usually, the only ways dissatisfied customers who dislike the public road network can demonstrate their demand is by moving or voting out politicians - if those were the same barriers to faster Internet speeds, we would probably be as bad off as we are now with telecom monopolies.