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Comment by datashovel | Hacker News Reader

"Our US congress had the chance to fix this back in 1990s and they screwed up with enforcing it properly. We could've had a better pure fiber-based national build out but it didn't work out."

I'm not familiar enough with the industry to have an opinion on this, but it sounds very odd that a private corporation is so tied to government that it can't innovate on its own? How does this work? And how did it end up like this? I guess what I'm after is an ELI5 on this last part of your comment :)

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You cannot break grounds without permits from the city, state, and federal governments (highway, streets, poles, etc) and then you must have an agreement from the land owners to lay the fiber through the rest to the places, think apartment buildings, rental places, and so on.

After that, you then have to schedule the construction to comply with the city regulations for quiet hours, cleanup regulations, inspections, and so on.

All of that cost a lot of money that only the federal government can handle alas the highway project we did.

For an example, we could have a federal law that said every time we rebuild the roads, there should be fiber laid in. Every new house should have new fiber by default, new water/gas pipes should have fibers laid in alongside of it, and so on.

IIRC, one city in CA already requires all new house constructions to have fiber wired up.

Exactly this. Fibre should be laid down to new housing just like Water and Gas Pipes. We used to do that with telephone wires, why not internet fibre?

Nationwide private deployment of fiber within the required parameters (i.e. universal service, network neutrality) is impossible without government intervention. The cost is simply too high and the created value is too hard to monetize.

Google Fiber?

Google Fiber doesn't deploy in any city that imposes build-out requirements, which compromises the universal service constraint. Build out requirements are also why my building and a couple of others have FIOS but nobody else does here in Baltimore. Verizon tried to build it, but the city wouldn't let it pick and choose which neighborhoods.

Google has also stated that Fiber is a way to shame ISP's into building fiber. It's not clear that an independent company that didn't have synergestic internet businesses would undertake the same capital investment.

Nearly every SP has made investments in "synergistic internet businesses." They appear to expect to extract the benefits of vertical integration in those businesses without making Google's investment in access.

Also, Google has announced the intention to bring Google Fiber to several major cities. It's not a demo, or hobby, anymore.

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