To put the issue to rest with some finality, here are the costs of the EPB fiber network, as per the report from the Office of Legislative Reasearch for the Con

To put the issue to rest with some finality, here are the costs of the EPB fiber network, as per the report from the Office of Legislative Reasearch for the Conneticut General Assembly: "EPB issued $229 million in revenue bonds in 2008. Of this amount, $162 million was used to build the fiber optic network, which is owned by the EPB's Electric Division and is used for both the smart grid and telecommunications services." "To date, EPB's Fiber Optic Division has borrowed approximately $50 million from the Electric Division to finance the costs of adapting the broadband network to provide telecommunications services to its customers." For simplicity, let's ignore the fact that a part of these costs should be attributed to the power company, as the fiber network is also used for smart metering. At a cost of $212M for 83 000 subscribers, this gives us a cost per subscriber of $2554. If you add $28M to account for the first three years interest and other financing costs, it becomes $240M for 83 000 subscribers, resulting in $2892 per subscriber. So there. A far cry from $5000 per subscriber. Source: https://www.cga.ct.gov/2012/rpt/2012-R-0515.htm https://www.cga.ct.gov/2012/rpt/2012-R-0515.htm