Last Mile

Sounds like a sequel to Chariots of Fire, maybe. But no. In financial circles, the term usually refers to the Telecom Wars that came to a neighborhood curb near, near away. Taking a phone call from a local neighborhood port via satellite or other means to some remote part of the world was relatively easy. But in the 1990s, the hard part of telecomm was hooking up that last mile, i.e., the mile that reached every individual home. And homes had an insatiable appetite for downloading um, "art films" at the time. So they couldn't live happily with a slow and unstable wireless throughput vehicle. They wanted fat pipe (different fat pipe from other wars that happened in the mid 2010s as states legalized it). The fat pipe of choice that mostly won, was cable. In a prototypical $100 monthly cable bill, some $50 or so of that bill went to kindly loving folks like Comcast; and $50 was split among the various content providers like Viacom, Disney, Fox and the gang.