Brent Legg

This paper argues that with fiber and gigabit cable now reaching most US locations, bandwidth is no longer the binding constraint on internet performance—latency is. The authors contend that latency is determined largely outside the last mile, by middle-mile fiber, peering density, and proximity to Internet Exchange Points (IXPs), so the massive public investment in last-mile deployment does little to address it. They distinguish AI training, which follows power supply, from AI inference, which follows network performance.