It'll be another nine days until Verizon turns on DSL service here, so at the moment Charles' laptop is propped up on some boxes by the window, "borrowing" wireless internet service from one of our neighbors (thanks guys!) and sending it down an ethernet cable to my laptop.

So maybe I'm just in the mood for free wifi love, but this seems like a pretty good idea. For the clicking-averse: Philadelphia is exploring the possibility of rolling out free citywide wireless internet service. As you might expect, the nerd community thinks this is a great idea, since it could help automate all kinds of things like self-reading gas and electricity meters, smart stoplights that report when they're out, and citywide support for VoIP cell phones. And let's not discount the social value of every Half Life 2 player having the same ping. Equality at last!

Of course, it'll never happen. Comcast HQ is based in Philly, for one, and they're unlikely to think this is a particularly great idea. The cell companies would never tolerate it either. And then there's the question of how you can secure a citywide network -- is the city culpable for filesharing? For DoS attacks? How easy will identity theft be when everyone is on the same network, and switching ISP subnets is as easy as driving down the street, looking for unsecured network shares?

Still, I think this is how things are going to have to go, eventually. Digital packet switching means that methods of transmitting information are interchangeable -- with modern network technology, there's no reason why you should have satellite TV, DSL internet and analog phone service: everything can, and probably should, come out of the same hole in the wall.

It might seem like this is impractical -- what happens when that infrastructure becomes outdated, and all services suffer from a crowded data pipe? I don't think this is likely to be a major problem, however: people continue to consume an increasing amount of data, but the rate of increase should be slowing shortly. HDTV represents a major leap in consumer bandwidth, but it seems plausible to say that consumption by bitrate is going to level off for a while -- there just isn't any household device now or on the horizon that can consume data faster than HDTV. And frankly, there's a limit to the bandwidth of the human nervous system. Until we develop technologies to interface with new sensory modalities (3D, smell-O-vision, etc), we're probably pretty well set with a few tens of megabits per person. And while that's a huge information rate relative to current consumer broadband bandwidths, it could be satisfied with feasible current technology: Verizon is rolling out fiber-to-the-home in select markets right now.

It doesn't make any more sense for competing private companies to own your broadband connection than it does for them to own your water or gas connection, or the asphalt under which they run. Efforts to ensure competition have been problematic at best: do we let the world's Verizons freeze others out of the broadband game, or do we force them to let competitors use the network Verizon paid to build? Neither makes much sense. Data delivery is a natural monopoly, and natural monopolies ought to be run by the government.