Robert Sawyer? noted that SF had failed to foresee the difficulty in setting up telecommunications networks.

Typically, if it's in old SF, it's near magical treatment allows it to take up even less space than your phone; Dick Tracy's watch is a good example. While furturistic infrastructure elements like water, electricity, roads, mass transit, and garbage removal are occasionally examined, communications infrastructure is not. Even now, hardly any of us have for example, a fibre optic data line coming into our houses -- too expensive.