It makes sense to me that the government should own "the pipes", and then lease them to competing firms, as these are a vital communication infrastructure.

That is called municipal broadband and quite a few municipalities are looking very hard at it.

http://www.businessinsider.com/chattanooga-tennessee-big-int...

Because, you want the pipes to grow.

I wonder if that really matters all that much. It could be my limited perspective talking, but fiber seems pretty future-proof. Nothing is faster than light; the only conceivable improvement would be cables that can handle wider spectrum of light.

(The nodes on the other hand, of course, are continually improving)

Ethernet cable is a similar story. NICs have advanced tremendously, but Cat5 (defined in 1991) is still usually all you need.

Fiber is future proof but most people don't have it. The process of getting it is called growth. If it's the case that making the "pipes" a public utility would have hindered growth, then you would never have got fiber.

And 100M ethernet over Cat5e is pretty useless. Standard WiFi these days is 150-300 Mbps. I regret not running Cat6 in to my extension just to be safe.

I would run Cat6a if I was building a house, because it's the latest spec and not much more expensive, but Cat5e is still great. Standard WiFi never gets anywhere close to those speeds, is simplex, and I find a 10Mbps Ethernet (powerline) link handily outperforms a 100Mbps WiFi connection for networked file system access. (Probably either an issue with the simplex or dropped packets)

P.S. Cat5e can still do 1Gbps, just not over quite as great a distance as Cat6. Although Cat5e definitely isn't rated for 10Gbps (nor is vanilla Cat6 for that matter)

Cat5e does do gigabit speeds. You might be thinking of it's predecessor Cat5.

I 100% agree. In my ideal world, the government builds fiber to every house and pulls it back to a central POP where private entities compete to provide service over the top. Thus creating REAL competition and removing the barrier to entry. Unfortunately we've got a lot of people with their heads in the sand that think government is the root of all evil... so I'm working with what I've got :)