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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

As an ISP: right of way and economics of $ per last mile customer reached are HARD. The incumbents in an area, generally the copper phone line company (ILEC) and cable TV operator (Comcast, RCN, Charter, whatever) were handed the aerial ROW and underground ROW on a silver platter 30+ years ago, when there was no such thing as telecom competition. It was just assumed at that time that those two companies would be installing stuff on the same poles as the power company.

They built wherever they pleased, whenever they pleased, at minimal regulatory cost and with minimal additional costs. Because of course nobody would buy a house with no dialtone phone and/or no cable TV.

Now in a modern era if a FTTH ISP wants to come along and overbuild the same routes as the phone company, it's a lot more difficult, time consuming and expensive.

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We're in the process of doing that where I live.

https://marshallfibernet.com/

The reasons this is getting off the ground at all is because our city government spent the past 5 years dotting every i and crossing every t to be able to drop the hammer on AT&T and WOW! without retaliation. Also, we own our own electric utility, and on top of their ROW they're also bankrolling most of this operation with a sweetheart loan deal (overpaying for electricity worked out in the end, who knew).

Having the electrical utility controlled by the local county can be a huge advantage. The counties in eastern WA where the local PUD (public utility district) owns the last mile AC power distribution networks have been generally quite successful building their own dark fiber networks. Because of course they don't need to ask themselves for permission to build, they already own the poles and ROW, they just do it. They already have linemen and bucket trucks, flaggers, insurance, spool trailers, etc.

Then ISPs can reach end user customers by paying the PUD for L2 transport across their networks.

This new PUD fiber infrastructure exists separately from whatever the local Telco and cable TV operators have built.

It also has the benefit where citizens can decide their generation supply (ie renewables) vs shareholders in a for-profit electrical utility or generator deciding based solely on profitability.

Neat story of small independent FTTH ISP that leased dark fiber from the power company to connect a city of 15,000 in rural GA:

http://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/appln/FTTH-DIY.html

For those interested, thefoa.org website also has a lot of excellent free training material and reference related to fiber networks (at OSI model layer 1).

> Because of course nobody would buy a house with no dialtone phone and/or no cable TV.

This was sometimes due to a legal requirement, similar to requirements to maintain water and sewer connections: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

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