Probably the same number that dream of going to work at the intensely-hated digital utilities, aka cable companies.
Who in the world has ever said "My dream is to work at Time Warner Cable"? I wouldn't tell people I worked for them. My house might get egged.
Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if companies that design and operate water treatment plants aren't often more innovative than a company like TWC that has no competition on many of its markets.
Since 2002, the internet speed at my parents' house in Virginia has increased from about 256 kbps (SDSL) to 50 mbps (fiber). That increase of 100x isn't quite in keeping with Moore's law, but it's pretty damn impressive and talented people at those "intensely-hated digital utilities" are the ones behind it, backed up by the tens of billions of dollars those companies are throwing at the problem.
256 kbps was pretty slow even in 2002. Using that as your baseline is like bragging that you doubled the wealth of somebody who previously had one dollar to his name — big percentage improvements on small numbers are not huge accomplishments in the grand scheme of things.
My personal situation: My Internet is the worst it's been in years, more expensive than it's ever been, and I have no other option than Cox in my area. I know very few people who have seen any notable improvements in the past 10 years.
Lucky them. Since the late 1990's, the internet speed at my parent's house in Alabama has gone from 38.8kbps to... 38.8kbps. The house is in the sticks, in a bowl, served by ancient, poorly maintained telephone and cable lines.
The future has been here for decades (see South Korea, or much of Europe, or...), it's just very unevenly distributed.
One of the things that led to the current situation is municipalities granting favorable franchise agreements to get companies to serve places like that which the market wouldn't have served to begin with. I don't think we want more of that.
The future is here, in the U.S. too: http://www.akamai.com/dl/documents/akamai_soti_q213.pdf?WT.m... (see page 13). The U.S. ranks 8th in average connection speeds. It can't compete obviously with places like South Korea, where half the whole country lives in the Seoul metro area, but is better than much of Europe.
I agree that we don't want to provide favorable terms to companies who aren't interested in managing telecommunications infrastructure as a public utility.
I've heard the population density argument, before.
It's bunk. If it wasn't, we would expect to see reasonably priced 100mbit+ residential fiber service in NYC, SFO, SEA, and other densely populated metro areas. Instead, we see somewhat reasonably priced 1gbit residential service in Chattanooga, TN (1/10th SFO's population, and 1/20th NYC's), wherever Google deigns to pick a fight, and places like Sebastapol, CA (with a population just under 8,000 people).
I had a ~5mbps cable modem connection in southwestern Washington State miles from the nearest thing that could reasonably be called a city in 1999. 50mbps represents a 10x increase in 16 years.
I know of at least one in my circle of acquaintances, who is a highly intelligent and accomplished engineer. There's lots of fascinating stuff to do at a water company: industrial control systems (software and hardware), large structure engineering, resource management, etc.
Lots, it's an entire subdiscipline of civil engineering. So by that token, maybe we can also ask how many talented people dream of becoming legislative lawyers.
