Tax and rate payers pay for it but can’t use it. Not right.
I know this issue very well because a friend owns the largest privately owned metro area fiber optic system in the country (and probably the world).
Articles like this are written to stir up lefties with conspiracy theories. Please note the dreck in the article about so-called “net neutrality” and getting governments into the business of telecom.
The problem with gig fiber to the home is the cost of the connection and getting people to pay for faster speeds. My friend and I very much wanted to do fiber to the home limited partnerships to finance the cost of taking fiber to homes neighborhood by neighborhood. Unfortunately, we found that very few people care about the extra speed. Their existing DSL or cable modems is as much as they think they need, and getting them to pay a premium for gig fiber proved to be a deal killer.
Just to sketch a little of what is involved, running fiber above ground down streets is relatively cheap - about $10k-15k a mile for a basic geometry. If you want a system that is fail safe (”self-healing”), the costs might double. If the system has to go underground, multiply by about 3) The real expense is incurred when you connect to the home. Apart from the “drop, there is the cost for a gig switch, new cabling, set boxes, etc. If you can achieve a significant percentage of subscribers per mile, the business model works.
The difficulty is that people have to understand the value of having fiber, and almost no one in a typical, economically suitable neighborhood does. Moreover, given the present economics of fiber, far from all neighborhoods have the discretionary income to easily afford it. Chattanooga’s system was put in by the power company when it was replacing its power lines. Consequently, the marginal cost to that utility of running fiber was very little more than the cost of the fiber-optic cable itself. Penetration to homes and businesses, however, isn’t all that impressive. One reason is that a couple of years ago the cost for the fully loaded service was about $300/mo. Now they are offering a gig for $70/mo., but phone and cable TV are costs on top of that. In the case of Google, Google has almost limitless capital, and KC project was as much for getting free PR as it was about the system. I doubt that anyone is making money at the moment on gig/fiber to the home. I am a big proponent of this, but you can’t fight the market, and the market for the nonce says gig fiber is a solution to a problem it doesn’t recognize exists.
IMHO, the article is mostly leftist nonsense.