Covering the whole country with Google Fiber could cost $140 billion
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I'm curious what the breakdown is between rural areas (where, presumably, construction costs per mile are far cheaper), suburban areas, and rural areas (where you can hit a lot of people per building, but costs to shut down a road are higher, and where there are few options for routing.)
It's depressing how hard it is to get 1Gbps into random buildings even in Silicon Valley. Technology has made 100M fairly feasible in most offices, at least (you can do channel-bonding on an old T1 circuit to get 100M, even without fiber!), for <$3k/mo. It's still hit or miss if you're on-network for municipal fiber (in PA), the alternative fiber providers (like IP Networks in SF), etc.
The only reason no one is pursuing it is because the incumbent providers have lobbied tirelessly to create the notion that no one can afford to deploy new fiber, which is clearly false.
If we were to convince regulators to push hard on telcos and recover the rural broadband tax, we'd have probably nearly half a trillion dollars to pay for it. [2]
[1] http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/2011/04/07/what-does-a-gigaby...
Did Google ever mention they're shooting for 100% of the country in the near term? They did not. Are they likely to follow traditional ISP model and launch market by market? Yeah, from what we've seen that seems like a reasonable assumption. Is Google likely to borrow $140,000,000,000 to blanket the entire country? Past experience says probably not.
Hopefully it will complete as at the moment we dont have any data guarantee's for the last mile. In fact if you can get a dial tone on the 100 year old copper, thats good enough for the old telco(which was privatised about 10 - 15 years ago).
My opinion (and its different in australia due to our different views on private vs public investment, market size, country size, population etc) is that most large infrastructure just cant/wont be built by private investment, because it just isnt profitable. Diving into it I would say that most power plants, telecommunication, water infrastructure, roads etc are mostly funded by the government even if that is through tax breaks etc. So if the citizens want infrastructure the govt needs to pony up the cash.
It also hasnt been lost on a lot of people here, that we sold off our government owned telco 10-15 years ago, only to create a new one not to long after. Ahh The cycles of govt.
'The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen':
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_0026...
Cable companies are deep in debt for a reason. I just don't see Google hiring 80,000 people are whatever it takes and hope it just works financially.
Additionally it's not clear that Google sees the KC experiment as anything other than an experiment. Money is not the only rubric by which Google Fiber's success should be measured.
Just having the data on what running Google Fiber took would be super useful and interesting (and in the event that it does fail, I hope that info makes it out into the wild).
It's only the pressure from incumbent cable and telco operators that has held back municipal fiber deployment across most of the country. Once that pressure is pushed aside, cities are willing to move very quickly.
Sounds like a win all round.