I do not live in the US and I do not pay US taxes. So I have no opinion
on the original question. Let me offer an observation:
I live in NL and I have two strands of glass plus coax into my house in
a rural village in the ‘far south’. I do not live at the end of a 50
mile dirt road but for NL it is quite rural. The fibre has been
installed and paid for by a company called Reggefiber, founded and
backed by not-for-profit real estate developers. They do not provide the
Internet service. I have a choice of ISPs using the Reggefiber glass. I
buy 500/500 from one of those at EUR 69.50, ~ USD 85 per month; this
includes a data-only SIM with 1GB/month on 4G whether I want it or not.
I actually get 500/500 to the office, we peer with the ISP. I get at
least 450/450 to my family server hosted in DE (RTT ~15ms); so I have to
bandwidth limit the back-ups I pull *to* my house from DE lest I
inconvenience the rest of the family. I canceled the cable broadband
which I initially kept for redundancy after a year because the glass is
more than reliable enough.
I am a happy customer!
The reasons this got installed were not subsidies from public/tax money.
They were:
1) Reggefiber was not connected to one of the incumbents with existing
plant.
2) Reggefiber was run by people who understood long term, low return
investments.
2a) They got their money from the part of the banks that understand
such investments.
3) The government did not provide subsidies but regulations that made
this viable for Reggefiber and the ISPs.
3a) Afaik the government provided a subsidy for a small number (1?) of
proof-of-concept deployments.
I guess you see it coming from the past tense already. KPN, the major
incumbent acquired Reggefiber through some pretty impressive lobbying
effort that made it impossible for the founders to keep it. The company
still exists but deployment rates have gone down. On the bright side:
the model has proven to work and there are quite some smaller localised
efforts. I guess that these are similar to the US co-op idea that was
mentioned here.
Just my own observations. Think globally, act locally.
Daniel
