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Comment by Feniks | Hacker News Reader

Not really surprising, my own country is still profiting from the massive investment in cable done by the state owned telecom operators in the 80s. Infrastructure like this is something that can only be done with government support.

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I don't think that's the case. Google certainly has more disposable cash available at less bureaucratic cost than many country's governments. They just lack the interest.

If there's a single company with a forever long track record of half-assing products and never finishing them, only to cancel them later with disregard to current customers, that's Google.

They make so much money that nothing really matters for them.

A government owned company has easier access to public land and can do that while doing their public infrastructure work. It can go as a more coordinated work and costs can be saved greatly, especially when the property is publicly owned. The work itself is then normally done by private companies in a bidding process. The government own companies faces only problems, when it has to cross private property.

While a private company has to pay for the usage of the public property too. It has also to work on the allowance to use the public property at all. Also the construction costs are much higher, as they cannot share with other infrastructure costs. If private companies wants to share the costs of infrastructure work, it requires much more coordinating work. They also need to know way in advance when which infrastructure work by which private company is planned to be able to work together. That will become a bureaucratic mess.

I’m not disagreeing (or agreeing) with you, but your comment did make me wonder if Google truly is less bureaucratic than (all / some) governments. For example back in NZ where I grew up sure there’s bureaucracy throughout the government - but it does seem like they deliver a _lot_ more than Google is capable of and across a far more diverse product range (e.g. from fibre to the home to universal healthcare etc...), interesting thing to think about and if nothing else it highlights to me just how poorly run most google products must be given their flop rate despite their enormous wealth, amount of data on people and their reach.

And I suspect that getting into a business where you have mange the installation and physical plant and also provide real customer service isn't one where Google has or wants to get involved.

You clearly underestimate the cost of providing fibre to every house. This is why in the past electricity, water and phone lines were rolled out by the government.

I would say "only", but it is damned harder if one do not already have some fixed installation one can exploit.

In Norway the fastest growing deployments of fiber is done by regional power companies in cooperation with a services provider (data, VOIP, IPTV etc). This because the power companies already have poles and pipes that they can run the fiber along.

In the US too, the gold standard of internet providers is Chattanooga's municipal electric company for similar reasons.

> Infrastructure like this is something that can only be done with government support.

Bullshit.

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