This is a period of transition that resembles the transition between railroads and automobiles. When you ride a train you go to the railway station at a scheduled time, you travel with the people that happen to be on the train, you go to preset destinations. This is what the current television world is like. You tune into the stations that have been prescribed through some collaboration between advertisers and TV executives in New York and Hollywood. Moving from broadcast model to the teleputer is like moving from a railroad model to automobiles.
Automobiles are essentially egalitarian transportation systems.
They aren't organized - like the Internet. A Ferrari, say, and a Toyota Tercel look like radically different machines, but the fact is that any car endows the average person with more freedom than any railroad. For the last 20 years or so, really big projects have been considered arrogant, incapable of working because they are big. Now there is talk of Motorola's global satellite project Iridium. There are going to be a lot of big fiber projects in the next decade.