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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Yes, just like sewers: http://www.ajc.com/news/local-govt--politics/atlanta-area-st....

Also, nobody advocating for "treating telecom like a utility" is actually advocating for that. Try looking up the cost of a county water/sewer hookup sometime. It's not free, and your $50/month water bill doesn't pay for it. I'm paying off a $30,000 bill to get "public utility" water and sewer access. That's pretty typical.

If we required every house builder to pay thousands of dollars up front to install fiber people would be frothing at the mouth.

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$30,000 seems like a lot unless you live in a very rural area. Where I live in Michigan it's $1,410 for a hookup within 500 feet of a road. Why is it so expensive where you are?

Also, fiber would probably be pretty cheap once the infrastructure was already in place. A single phase overhead power line is often provided for free to new homes and underground service runs about $3.50/foot so I imagine fiber would be similarly cheap.

Where in Michigan? Here's the fee schedule in my county: http://www.aacounty.org/departments/inspections-and-permits/.... Fairfax County, where my parents live is similarly expensive: about $25,000 for a smallish house.

Midland county. Here's a similar document for an area near me; the city doesn't seem to have a fee schedule online anywhere.

http://www.lincoln-twp.org/forms%20policies/New%20Water%20Co...

$2,520 is what they charge for water; not sure what it is for wastewater - they may not have a public sewer system - but it's about $3,500 where I live. It used to be $150 (seriously, not a typo) and people got really upset when they raised it by a few thousand dollars all at once a few years ago.

I guess it's not a very densely-populated area and the state is surrounded by water so that might explain why it's so cheap.

You don't have to speculate, it's cheap:

https://arstechnica.com/business/2015/08/how-a-small-city-of...

Sandy's system covers the 2,400 housing units within city limits, and it cost $7.5 million, so it cost over $3,000 per house to wire up (or $3,500 per subscribing household). Which is actually on the higher side considering that Sandy is a pretty dense little city (about double the density of a typical suburb).

Assuming the city can get a 4% bond, and depreciates the asset over 20 years, about $27 of that $40 goes just to depreciation and interest.

That cost is actually fairly typical. What isn't typical is an 83% uptake rate. Average for municipal providers is about 54%, and average for private FTTH providers like Verizon is 30-35%. If your uptake rate is 35% instead of 83%, your monthly cost in depreciation and interest alone jumps to $64. That's before the cost of bandwidth, maintenance, customer service, etc., which typically eats up about half the monthly bill.

Except once it's hooked up, it doesn't need to be hooked up again.

And given that most providers will make you pay to run a line to your house, you don't exactly have a leg to stand on

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