Use the same guiding spirit as the rural electrification project of the 1930's to get this done. Bringing symmetrical broadband service to every address in the US is just as important as electrifying the countryside was back then.
Symmetrical broadband enables a lot of really interesting p2p use cases that are otherwise infeasible. Think content distribution, routing, etc. You don’t need to be part of the tech crowd to benefit from p2p software.
If everyone had upload speeds as fast as download speeds, “personal clouds” and a “data center in every home” would be real possibilities.
I could use some competition in this space.
I’d like to see something like fiber to 80% of the country, and then alternatives (like low-attitude satellite internet) for the last 20%.
Give companies huge tax breaks if they’re doing this work.
No need to reinvent a process that worked well the first time around.
For another, the equipment you need to support a given level of bandwidth has dropped orders of magnitude in cost. For another, endpoint hookups are faster and easier, we know much better how to splice fiber faster and cheaper. etc etc... it takes a real lack of imagination to claim it's the same as when we put in electricity and telephone networks or even early fiber or copper networks.
Take for example this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21716312
Alon Levy mainly cites the flawed design-build model where design and construction contracts are awarded to the same firm as well as the comparatively high cost of TBM use for deep stations / tunnels versus cut-and-cover construction techniques for simpler, shallow stations.
Your arguments are the same exact same arguments big companies had when rolling out the initial electrical and phone grids, and yet today we would find it ridiculous if you said you weren't able to get electrical service to your house.