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> Ultimately everywhere that has wired power should be able to get fiber, if right of ways were reasonable. That's quite a caveat, but still doesn't get you to

• Retric 3y ago
  What matters is the distance between the end of your driveway to the end of the next person’s driveway not the exchange. Like power lines many homes can all use the same cable. And sure there’s going to be a few unprofitable edge cases, that’s what mandates are for. A company that wants to serve high density neighborhoods ends up paying for a few random houses far from each other. The average cost per home is what makes an area profitable at least when you setup the local monopoly correctly.
  • infecto 3y ago
    No, mandates absolutely should not be involved unless the agency that is issuing the mandate wants to cover those unprofitable edge cases. Additionally the distance to the GP home and the exchange it what matters. Unlike electricity, you maybe only have a small percentage of a rural area wanting fiber. If GP is not in a very dense area, he may be the only person within a reasonable distance that wants fiber and no company wants to foot the bill for that.
    • Retric 3y ago
      Mandates are how we got electricity and phone lines to every home. Building such networks are a natural monopoly and communities have real leverage if they want to use it. Subsidies as needed are fine, subsidies without mandates simply waste taxpayer money without actually fixing the underlying problem. Without a mandate companies just take that cash and build the same profitable network they would have build without it. Also, 93% of Australian homes have home internet. Cheap fiber beats any other technology when it’s available. So perhaps the neighbor doesn’t want fiber today, in 2 or 20 years when someone else moves in you don’t need to lay a new fiber. It’s all just statistical noise from an investment perspective.
      • infecto 3y ago
        85% of the Australian population lives in a urban metro area. It is not statistical noise in rural areas. Maybe where you live is different than what I have experienced in rural areas but rural America is not dense enough to always warrant building and maintaining connectivity like fiber. Sat. or Cell service is usually much more cost effective. Sure if a community/city want to build out their own fiber setup, I think that is a great idea but I do not believe mandates should be required for companies that want to build out fiber unless similar to some areas in electrical grids you separate the concerns of running and maintaining the fiber lines and the exchange/connects. Also you keep saying mandates but I think from an American perspective it was actually subsidies. If you are saying the government should subsidize the infrastructure I do think that can work but I believe its up to the local government to do it.
        • Retric 3y ago
          You’re misunderstanding what I am saying. In the US we handed out enough subsidies to pay for full fiber to the home at this point 90B from the federal government alone for rural communities. However we didn’t attach strings to that money aka mandates so they effectively just pocketed it.
          • deleted 3y ago
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