If you look at the Raleigh/Durham area, Google Fiber is coming here and it makes logical sense for a huge number of reasons. Here are a few: 1) they can deal

If you look at the Raleigh/Durham area, Google Fiber is coming here and it makes logical sense for a huge number of reasons. Here are a few: 1) they can deal independently with multiple, local bureaucracies, each of which is easier to deal with than a consolidated large city's. 2) there's a ton of high tech / biotech here already, and demand for fiber. 3) The population is highly educated and there are several very good universities (UNC, Duke, NCSU) and smaller schools (Shaw, Peace, Meredith, NCCU, ...) in the area. 4) With the exception of older parts of Raleigh & Durham, all of the cities are pretty well planned and have layouts that make running fiber pretty straightforward, and all of the municipalities agreed to accommodate all of Google's requirements. Coincidentally, we had 0 fiber ISPs a year ago and now we have 3 (plus TWC is updating all their "extreme" customers to 300mbps). AT&T has been laying fiber like crazy and Centurylink is here, too.