Ultimately everywhere that has wired power should be able to get fiber, if right of ways were reasonable.
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.
On land it’s usually easier and cheaper to use huts with power.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
However we didn’t attach strings to that money aka mandates so they effectively just pocketed it.