content: To give an example that it's not free assume you give everyone 1G non blocking and then go price out some high density router hardware. Assume like $7,000/10G port but you can't build a network or route traffic with one port so every 1G of traffic needs 2G of traffic to pass through a router and double it for redundancy to 4G. Assume you have to pass through at least 5 routers you are at $14,000 in layer 3 port to deliver a dedicated 1G of bandwidth to a single subscriber. On top of this you have optical gear for transport, physical fiber, power and space costs to host equipment, support contracts and personal costs etc.  Add/drop is ports are cheaper for optical but transport is not because of the multiple amps etc so assume another $15k for that and you are at almost $30k in up front hardware cost for 1G circuit without fiber, space, power, support, or staffing costs. At $50/month it would take 600 months or 50 years to recoup the costs but the refresh rate for hardware is closer to about 2-3 years so the amount of money needed to replace the hardware every 3 years is $833/month using those numbers.  There are lots of factors left out of that math but you get the point that line rate, non blocking $1G pipes for everyone for $50 can't happen without over provisioning. That's not to say ISP's can't do better but it's certainly not as simple as most people seem to believe it is. Cost per bit is getting cheaper but not as fast as traffic growth is increasing so overall costs are and will continue to climb. In order for the trend to continue something will need to come after over the top video becomes mainstream that uses exponentially more bandwidth. The obvious answer is things like 4K feeds to 4-5 devices at a time but what happens after that? The Internet is a long way from being able to support even that today but it should be interesting to see what happens after that point.