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Comment by bnchdrff | Hacker News Reader

I'm sick of waiting for this in the U.S. How much is it to rent a microtrencher and wire up my neighborhood with fiber and then lease a university/municipal network uplink?

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First you will need a license from your local government -- and they will want to know what you can do for them.

I think offering a sweet Internet connection to the whole neighborhood would be the "what you can do for them." Makes it more attractive for people to live there — and as a bonus, if people are paying their broadband fees to you and you live locally, it keeps in the money in the local economy, which most governments like.

Providing service to a neighborhood is considered "redlining" because it discriminates against all the neighborhoods that you don't serve. Thus the local government will probably require that you serve the entire city/county or nothing.

Organize a cooperative with your neighbors to purchase the capital equipment and sustain the costs to operate it. The initial "risk" will be shared and the members will derive a superior benefit by making profit and advertising costs (however minimal) unnecessary, and by allowing anyone willing and competent in the neighborhood to carry out tech support and installations.

And as a result nobody gets good internet.

Dammit.

Laying the fiber costs something like $1,000 per house and your uplink will cost over $2/Mbps/month (fortunately you can oversubscribe it 100:1 or more). That's not counting any of the equipment.

Laying in the fiber is a sunk cost, so that shouldn't be the biggest issue.

At two dollar per Mbps oversubscribed 100 times is $20 for each user/month, sell the service at $70 month, and you should have enough to turn a profit, pay back the investment and keep the thing operating.

Articles say Google's fiber network is estimated to cost between $3000 and $8000 per home. So at that rate, to wire up a block with 50 homes would be between $150000 and $400000.

Guess I'll stick with mesh networks and the barely-palatable porridge that SBC and Comcast are willing to give Detroit. We need some stimulus money up here.

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