It might look low cost until you look at a post-1980s suburb in the USA or Canada where 100% of the utilities are underground. There may be no fiber or duct routes. Just old coax used for DOCSIS3 owned/run by the local cable incumbent and copper POTS wiring belonging to the ILEC. The cost to retrofit such a neighborhood and reach every house with a fiber architecture can be quite high in construction and labor.



On Thu, Feb 2, 2023 at 9:14 AM Forrest Christian (List Account) <lists@packetflux.com> wrote:
The cost to build physical layer in much of the suburban and somewhat rural US is low enough anymore that lots of smaller, independent, ISPs are overbuilding the incumbent with fiber and taking a big chunk of their customer base because they are local and care.  And making money while doing it. 


On Thu, Feb 2, 2023, 8:22 AM Masataka Ohta <mohta@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp> wrote:
Mike Hammett wrote:

> I selfishly hope they don't because that's where independent
> operators will succeed. ;-)

Because of natural regional monopoly at physical layer (cabling
cost for a certain region is same between competitors but their
revenues are proportional to their regional market shares), they
can't succeed unless the physical layer is regulated to be
unbundled, which is hard with PON.

But, in US where regional telephone network has been operated
by, unlike Europe/Japan, a private company enjoying natural
regional monopoly, economic situation today should be no worse
than that at that time.

                                                Masataka Ohta