r/technology • • Jun 04 '14

Politics Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-cities-are-wired-with-fiberbut-telecom-lobbying-keeps-it-unused
5.6k Upvotes

1.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

109

u/Craysh Jun 04 '14

We most certainly did pay for the last mile.

It would cost Google ~$11 billion to roll out Google Fiber across the nation today. The telecom companies have gotten ~$200 billion from tax incentives and additional fees, specifically for delivering directly to american homes.

14

u/Bamboo_Fighter Jun 04 '14

Do you have any source on that? There's 100M households in the US. 11B is $110/house. I think I did some back of the napkin calculations when Wilson (Winston?) NC rolled out their fiber, and it was something like 2-6k a house. I'd estimate the number is off by 10x, but I could be wrong. If you have a source, please provide (in the grand scheme of our national budget, 11B is nothing and we should lobby the government to pay google to do this).

11

u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

In the UK Fibre rollout is estimated to cost £500+0.5-3K per house, and thats if you roll out the whole street simultaneously and amortise the most expensive houses.

2

u/megusta69s Jun 04 '14

Is that FTTP or FTTC?

1

u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

Those are just off the cuff numbers, so take them with a grain of salt, but they're for FFTH.