I don't know about a bust, but things can only go so high before people with money and ambition start looking elsewhere.
This... is not as true as you think it is, even here in Silicon valley.
If I could get $50/month/resident out of any of the reasonable-sized condos around here, I could easily give everyone gigabit Ethernet.
Problem is? even here in the heart of silicon valley, most people don't give a shit. Faster than wi-fi doesn't matter.
Hell, even you and me... I talk about bandwidth being important, but surewest has had fiber to the home in Sacramento for some time now... fast and very cheap. Do you see me moving to Sacramento? No, screw that.
I mean, it's a cool project, and I wish google luck, but the fiber itself isn't going to move real-estate markets.
I certainly agree that gigabit internet will be more valuable in the future than it is now.
But, will that make property way more valuable? maybe. thing of it is, compared to silicon valley property values, getting fiber in to multi-family dwellings isn't all that expensive.
You are gonna need like 50 neighbors to make the ongoing cost reasonable, so that's harder with single-family homes, but not impossible. Install costs are high, but not that high; generally $5-$15K one-time to trench from the street into a property and splice in, so if you can talk all your neighbors into blowing 10K+ each on the install, plus your $50 each ongoing, well, you could totally do it. The whole project is way more appealing than, say, moving your ass to Sacramento or Kansas or somewhere else you probably don't want to live.
My point is that if something changes the SV market situation, like an exodus of investors to Texas or another Google Fiber location, housing prices are going to fall fast as the money leaves.
You misunderstand. I'm not saying that gigE isn't great. Certainly within the next decade, (and hopefully sooner) nearly all of us are going to demand gigE to the home.
My point is just that the economics of the situation are such that the presence of gigE lines isn't going to move the price of real-estate all that much. In expensive areas, the cost of real-estate utterly dominates the cost of getting gigabit network connections, if all your neighbors want the same speed.
The main reason gigabit to the home is unaffordable right now is due to low density of demand, and as you point out, that is going to change.
Napster, then other file-sharing services (Morpheus, Kazaa), Bittorrent, etc. This was ~25% of internet traffic in the mid-00s
My point still stands:
> No one knew what to do with broadband before VoD and digital delivery (Steam, GoG, app stores, etc.) came along, and we're only a few years into widespread adoption of those technologies
Well that's just provably false:) Before flight people knew why flight would be useful. And before broadband people already knew that it would be important. I remember my mom in 1995 saying how useful she thought the internet would be once it was fast enough to transfer videos and pictures of her grand kids.
Obviously, we're not talking about datacenter-levels of oversubscription. You'd be talking consumer-levels of oversubscription. Yes, this would be an oversubscribed gigabit link, really a whole lot like DSL, except that instead of 10Mbps max, you get 1000Mbps max, and because the physical plant is so much cleaner, you could do much better QoS.
I mean, a shitty datacenter-level gige link delivered to a data center where the provider has a POP (if you are only buying a single gigabit; this stuff gets way cheaper as you buy in bulk) is about $750/month. Less if you know people, more if you sound like you have money when you call the sales rep; maybe 3x to 5x that if you want a big name. ($750 is what the he.net guys will quote you straight off.)
You would, of course, put 50 or 100 folks on that gigE link. Would this mean that everyone would get 1-2Mbps? not unless everyone was running the link full-throttle all the time.
This is... not dissimilar to the over-subscription ratios on DSL. And it mostly works okay, because it's hard to run a gigE link full-throttle all the time. And like I said, having clean physical plant (where you know the actual maximum throughput of a line, rather than the DSL bullshit, where it's loss depends on the phase of the moon and last time it rained) makes doing QoS way easier.
In many ways, this would be a lot like DSL, in that you'd have a 'star' topology within the building, each customer having a full-duplex connection to your pop within the building, then 'oversubscribe' according to cost concerns at the network edge.
Rent has doubled for most of the area over the last 5 years. In my dismay a few months ago, I did some research into buying a place but quickly came to the same conclusion as the author.
I just did a quick look around my area over on Zillow. A condo comparable to my apartment (townhome style, 2-car garage, similar sq ft / bedrooms, location, etc) is still listed for 23 times my current annual rent, even though rent went up 15% last year. I'm renting for 4.3% the price of an (old!) condo. Anyone who thinks this is sustainable is going to be in for a surprise.
[edit: rent calculations annual...]
If your monthly rent is 0.4% of current value, then over 12 months you'd pay a total of 4.8% of current value.
So more than half (3 / 4.8) ie most of your rent paid would be going to pay the property taxes alone.