Same people as build the roads and drive the trucks now.
Just in a different place. What's your objection, exactly?
If there's anything history teaches us, it's that things change. And we're due for a change. The trend in society these days is decentralization. All sorts of things - computing power, news reportage, publishing - that used to be in hands of natural monopolies or oligarchies are now becoming more democratic, thanks to the Internet. Big government and big business will continue to resist, but they can't hold out forever.
That last mile is the catch. There's simply more bandwidth some places than others, because to the more shortsighted decision makers, that makes too much seeming economic sense. Broadband upload speed is the chief bottleneck. I figure in 20 years, if some assholes ever nuke all our major metropoli, they'll kill a few dozen repairmen and destroy an awful lot of server farms. Mirrored servers in smaller cities will take over, but things will bog down on the `Net for a while. (And the companies that didn't have mirrored servers out yonder will be out of business.)
And then they'll finally lay down some OC-192 fiber in Hootin Holler. Expense is relative.
