Can a City Physically Run Out of Internet?

Can a city actually run out of internet? It sounds like stoner philosophy, but it's really a physics problem — and an economics one. In this episode, we untangle three separate bottlenecks: the hard Shannon-Hartley limit on fiber optic capacity, the nonlinear effects like the Kerr effect that eat into theoretical maximums, and the oversubscription model that makes consumer internet affordable. We explore why a San Francisco neighborhood's fiber connection turned into a slide show during a 2023 playoff game, how BT's London core network hit 98% utilization during lockdown without crashing, and why your 8 PM slowdown isn't a bug — it's the system working exactly as designed. The real question isn't whether we can build a network without peak-time slowdowns. We can. The question is whether we want to pay for it.