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Comment by Inhibit | Hacker News Reader

What! I refuse to believe every American premises isn't wired for fibre. Since we've paid for it so many times. And required it in many lucrative exclusivity contracts.

Some of the spending, for instance: https://www.jsonline.com/in-depth/news/2021/07/14/weve-spent...

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In the 1800's the US government paid for the building of its transcontinental railroad by offering cash plus land for every mile of completed laid railway track, with competition for completed miles coming from the other side of the country. That worked incredibly well. If you can find a good documentary on it, it is a fascinating story. There was an unbelievably intensive effort to get that project complete in the quickest possible time, including blasting tunnels through the Rocky Mountains - nothing stopped those companies from delivering the completed tracks.

You'd have fibre to the home if the government paid by the home tested to have symmetric gigabit, with competition between telco's to complete the available homes.

Instead, governments pay for things other than the outcome.

No surprise they don't get the outcome.

Pay close attention to the attempts to build semiconductor manufacturing in the USA. This will fail for the same reason - the government is paying big money, but for the wrong things. It should be paying the big money when the first production quality wafers are delivered in real products. There's a big fail coming up there because they don't heed the lesson of the railway.

> Pay close attention to the attempts to build semiconductor manufacturing in the USA. This will fail for the same reason - the government is paying big money, but for the wrong things. It should be paying the big money when the first production quality wafers are delivered in real products. There's a big fail coming up there because they don't heed the lesson of the railway.

Is that how it is structured in the EU?

And even today the largest private landowner in California is Catellus Development Corporation, which was one of the companies spun off from the railroads. They were given way more land than necessary to build the tracks.

I believe they were given some amount of land on each side of the track - I think it was a mile but that's a guess.

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