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You just included a lot of land nobody lives on in that number.

The US only has 4.09 million miles of road, that’s roughly how much fiber you need to get it to everyone’s driveway. At ~1-10$ a foot we’re talking ~20-200billion dollars etc and most of it’s already in the ground or dangling from utility poles.

We don’t have fiber everywhere because we didn’t mandate it the way we mandated electricity or phone lines to every home. It was billions of subsidies without sufficient strings so of course companies only built the most profitable networks.

I don't follow your last part but yes, in the US the federal government subsidized the electrification of rural America and with a add-on to give loans to telephone companies that wanted to expand service at the same time. I do not believe it is so much of a "mandate" but a subsidy that allowed for the majority of expansion. At this point most of rural America is already serviced by cell, satellite and now starlink that in a lot of areas it may not be cost effective. I say cost effective not from a corporate profitability but a non-profit community run initiative.

The last part is this:

The government already handed over the full cost of Fiber to the home everywhere. Just the Federal government alone has handed out over 90 Billion dollars for rural high speed internet. That estimate I gave also included profitable areas, the unprofitable rural network requiring strings is only a fraction of the total cost.

The money just didn’t have enough strings to require companies taking it to actually build out their networks everywhere.

Your cost estimate is not really reasonable for what it would cost to lay fiber out in the middle of nowhere at extreme scale using labor sources that don't currently exist. But the differences here are so stark that I'm not even going to argue against that, beyond what I've done. Let's go with it, while also considering you also have maintenance costs of course - quite large ones in fact when you're obligated to support and maintain wiring/towers even out in the middle of nowhere.

Now let's compare to Starlink. That system was privately designed, built, and deployed for a total cost of ~$10 billion. And while I don't know their maintenance costs, I do know they're now already turning a profit with a relatively small number of users. So that's providing complete and stable connectivity for the entire globe, at half of the bottom of an unrealistically low price for wiring a single country. And you get vastly better reliability, and near 0 labor maintenance. I don't think this is particularly close.

coverage to an entire area is either via "small number of satellites" in geostationary orbits or massive amounts of satellites for low earth orbits, you cannot have both.

"Just replaced by another" is massively oversimplifying every aspect of this, not just the act of putting an object in orbit, but also the coordination of that many MOVING satellites, their fuel levels / end-of-life procedures, all the ground infrastructure needed to support it, and the total amount of energy that this system requires (both on the side of the service providers and users).

Connecting rural or places without internet is not a technical problem, like everything in the world we built it is an issue of priorities. Starlink was not created "for the good of the farmer".

So how did this great rich nation, leader of the free world, owner of the largest army, manage to get cables to all those imperial square feet of people for power, telephone and water and is now in 2024 at the height of its power incapable of getting a much thinner cable in the same direction?

What happened in the last generation that you just so easily buy this cheap copout of "oh no, the whole nation is big and we now can't even cover a small state"?

As for water much of it uses wells drilled on each persons property. Electrical and telephone a lot was done as a new deal jobs programs like the Tennessee Valley authority. As such it was more about making endless work to give the unemployed untrained labor jobs trying to get the US out of the great depression.

This is a silly argument.

The US is about the same size as Europe.

Size is not a reason why the US has lack of access to high speed internet.

Ultimately everywhere that has wired power should be able to get fiber, if right of ways were reasonable.

Fibre can go about 100 km without a repeater which in the grand scheme of things isn’t very far. Keep in mind that Starlink works best with a fibre base station inside of the coverage cone. A few of those stations in northern Quebec built next to existing cell towers gets you a lot of connectivity for cheap.

Seems like a repeater could be powered just from induction with neighboring powerline, or solar+battery.

Subsea cables have built-in repeaters and they span thousands of miles.

On land it’s usually easier and cheaper to use huts with power.

You can do 400 km with unrepeated systems.

However, very seldom do you need or want to go that far on land since very, very few places worth connecting are more than 400 km from somewhere else.

Repeatered systems can go thousands of miles and the repeater sites are handy for local breakout.

> Ultimately everywhere that has wired power should be able to get fiber, if right of ways were reasonable.

That's quite a caveat, but still doesn't get you to 'fiber is feasible everywhere'.

Where I am (about 250km north-west of Sydney, Australia) my nearest exchange is 30km away, and no one is going to come up with the money to lay fiber out to me.

Starlink has been an amazing enabler.

What matters is the distance between the end of your driveway to the end of the next person’s driveway not the exchange. Like power lines many homes can all use the same cable.

And sure there’s going to be a few unprofitable edge cases, that’s what mandates are for. A company that wants to serve high density neighborhoods ends up paying for a few random houses far from each other. The average cost per home is what makes an area profitable at least when you setup the local monopoly correctly.

No, mandates absolutely should not be involved unless the agency that is issuing the mandate wants to cover those unprofitable edge cases.

Additionally the distance to the GP home and the exchange it what matters. Unlike electricity, you maybe only have a small percentage of a rural area wanting fiber. If GP is not in a very dense area, he may be the only person within a reasonable distance that wants fiber and no company wants to foot the bill for that.

Mandates are how we got electricity and phone lines to every home. Building such networks are a natural monopoly and communities have real leverage if they want to use it.

Subsidies as needed are fine, subsidies without mandates simply waste taxpayer money without actually fixing the underlying problem. Without a mandate companies just take that cash and build the same profitable network they would have build without it.

Also, 93% of Australian homes have home internet. Cheap fiber beats any other technology when it’s available. So perhaps the neighbor doesn’t want fiber today, in 2 or 20 years when someone else moves in you don’t need to lay a new fiber. It’s all just statistical noise from an investment perspective.

85% of the Australian population lives in a urban metro area.

It is not statistical noise in rural areas. Maybe where you live is different than what I have experienced in rural areas but rural America is not dense enough to always warrant building and maintaining connectivity like fiber. Sat. or Cell service is usually much more cost effective.

Sure if a community/city want to build out their own fiber setup, I think that is a great idea but I do not believe mandates should be required for companies that want to build out fiber unless similar to some areas in electrical grids you separate the concerns of running and maintaining the fiber lines and the exchange/connects.

Also you keep saying mandates but I think from an American perspective it was actually subsidies. If you are saying the government should subsidize the infrastructure I do think that can work but I believe its up to the local government to do it.

You’re misunderstanding what I am saying. In the US we handed out enough subsidies to pay for full fiber to the home at this point 90B from the federal government alone for rural communities.

However we didn’t attach strings to that money aka mandates so they effectively just pocketed it.

I am not so sure that is true.

Speaking only for the US. I don't have the data but I suspect most of the grid in rural America was built long ago. Everyone needs power, it is a natural monopoly. When they were building it out, everyone got hooked up and only requires regular maintenance. Sure, if there was a sudden growth spurt maybe more lines are run or higher capacity but I suspect for most of rural America that this is not true. I even suspect most of this electrification happened for free or very low rates to the household. Now, if you are building a new home that needs a grid tie-in, it usually costs quite a bit.

Now fiber on the other hand, not so much of a natural monopoly. There may be state imposed regulation where a cable company has rights to areas. You could have a totally free market and many different providers. In a rural area you might be able to sign up only 20% of the population with your service, you would still need to build out the infrastructure though and perhaps that 20% would not even cover costs.

It is easy to say everywhere with power should have fiber but America is vast and that would be quite expensive, I am not even sure a local effort would be able to cover costs.

GP said, "if right of ways were reasonable."

In the context of internet connectivity, I interpret a reasonable right-of-way policy being collectively-owned fiber which can be shared.

We don't say, "everybody who wants a road should build their own road along this path" we just build the damn road and share it.

I do not believe your interpretation is correct or what most others would assume to be the case but hey I could be wrong.

Right of way being reasonable means that the owner of the transmission lines did not charge unreasonable fees or requirements for using the same poles to run fiber.

And you are partly wrong on your last part, yes of course each individual is not building their own road but again, roads are natural monopolies, everyone wants a road of at least some minimum quality (dirt). Additionally it would be near impossible to get "right of way" to build your own road. In rural areas roads are indeed just dirt and to get it paved would require some majority of the individuals living out there to pay for it, YMMV depending on local rules. Since its a road its easier to get a majority to agree to to pack it with gravel or pave it, everyone that lives down that road is driving on it. I am not arguing that internet is or is not a right that everyone should have but that it is not always a natural monopoly, some people maybe don't want it, some have cell service, some are using Dish, maybe there are some cable connections available in certain areas. So yes, each individual does not build their own road but often in rural areas the burden for that road is shared and often stays as a dirt road because of it.

Your liberatarian dreamland example (though not reflective of any rural [public development] area for the last few decades that I'm aware of) is a perfect illustration of my point.

Even those areas with private roads [private developments generally] only have a single private road that everyone shares on a given route. The argument why is that it's a natural monopoly. But what does that mean?

It means high barriers to entry (often infrastructure) mean the first mover has an overwhelming advantage. Isn't that precisely the case with fiber, as you yourself were arguing?

So is provisioned fiber a sufficient barrier to entry to qualify as a natural monopoly or is it not? Please clarify.

Sorry I am not a "libertarian", republican or even a democrat but can we please try our best to keep politics out of this discussion, its such a low brow way to share your point.

I simply pointed out that when it comes to building infrastructure, right of way typically means the ability to build said infrastructure using someone's property. That could be land rights, rights to the transmission pole, rights underground etc. Additionally I was simply pointing out that people may be served by other forms of internet connectivity already (including starlink). That is all, nothing about politics, sorry to have ruffled your feathers.

I didn't mean to imply your own political beliefs, merely describe the character of the example given.

It is certainly the case that (in the old US of A at least) we seem to make a sport of trying to tear up our roads as frequently as possible so that each individual utility can separately work on the same shared space, to the detriment of those living in the area. Is that an ideal way to organize infrastructure projects?

No, of course not! It would be much better if we all coordinated to commonly achieve our shared goals rather than stepping on each other in a vain race to the top! Oh well, a man can dream.