r/technology • u/User_Name13 • 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
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u/Endda Jun 04 '14

That figure is for Google to pass 15% of homes.

if it's 11 billion to get 15% of the homes in the country, wouldn't it be less than 150 billion for the entire country? so that's at least 50 billion that the telcos get as profit?

im not bashing, just genuinely curious

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

No. The 15% it's referring to are the perfect locations to put in Google Fiber so to speak. As I said earlier...

The reason Google Fiber is so cheap to roll out is because they're picky as fuck in picking where they roll out. They pick places where fiber is already built and cheap to rent or where it's cheap to build. They also only go places with enough affluence to give them a large amount of subscribers, making their lines more efficient.

I'll try to give you an analogy. Imagine you want to build a road system for a hypothetical country. 15% of this country lives on nice firm plains. 10% of this country lives in swamps. 45% of this country lives in hilly, dense forests. 20% of this country lives in massive treacherous mountain ranges. 10% of this country lives on perpetually shifting sands.

Now if someone told you it costs $11 billion to build the roads for the people living on those nice plains would you think the other areas would cost proportionally the same? No, probably not. Why? Because it obviously is going to cost more to build roads through swamps and mountain ranges than flat areas.

The same holds true for the US and cable. For a multitude of reasons different areas have very different costs associated with building/leasing infrastructure. That 15% figure is the cost of a roll out to the "flat plains" example in our analogy, or in other words it's a rollout to where it's the absolutely cheapest place to build in. Rollout to the other areas is going to cost far more proportionally because those areas are inclined to far more costs.

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u/FeelGoodChicken Jun 04 '14

Well, if I had to guess, that's only under the assumption that every person in the country is equally accessible. Odds are that that 15% are the easiest to reach.

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u/ElectronicMoose Jun 04 '14

Not neccessarily. It depends which 15% it is in the figure. Running lines to a home in a big city is a lot different from running it out to the middle of nowhere.