I was involved in the planning for a FTTH project that never materialized largely due to the cost of per-home installation. The numbers I've heard in the industry about Verizon's per household installation (on the east coast) is $4k per home.

There's a difference between fiber to the driveway and fiber to the home itself. I'm guessing the $700 price is fiber to the driveway. Existing players can (and almost always do) run the last few hundred feet over copper even if they call it fiber to the home.

It seems absurd there's such a cost differential, but there you go. If you look at other types of hookups, you'll find they can be equally expensive. Sewer hookups are four digits usually too.

Now we don't know if Google will actually take this approach, but the numbers they quoted aren't completely absurd for some cases. Though I imagine Google has a few neat tricks planned which may upset some long-held assumptions.

FiOS is fiber all the way, they rip out the copper that was there previously even. The costs have gotten cheaper as they scaled up, but even their initial costs were on the lowest end of the OP's estimate.

For what it is worth, it's actually fiber to the house. But good luck connecting a computer directly to that fiber.

Now, practically speaking, fiber to a gigabit network connection should be all you need, but it's practically not much of a difference from what Comcast offers in our area. It's just a marketing point.

It's a big difference because Comcast caps your speed. For FiOS there's an ethernet cable coming out of the box that the fiber cable goes into and it only goes as fast as you pay for, topping out at 50Mbps (for $145/mo). Apparently Google will support gigabit ethernet at uncapped speeds. Huge upgrade.

Maybe the extra cost is in buying off the incumbent telecoms. Or getting around them. Just speculating.

I don't think it costs that much in terms of paying the municipality to lay a new set of cables. I'd guess most cities would be happy to have you. But it is expensive. Digging a trench to the house, installing the wire, filling the trench back up, you gotta pay someone for that. And you have to pay the crews that lay the wire. Then you have to pay people to block the street, probably there is some fee to the police involved. Of course this does not even count peering costs and the cost of people to manage and maintain the network. I'd not be surprised if the labor costs were in the hundreds of dollars per house, and much larger for the street portion of the laying.

Google is going to have to build (or outsource) a lot of what Verizon already has. He may be considering those costs when he does the per household numbers. Consider that Verizon has an army of trained field technicians, fiber trucks, call centers, easement rights, and so forth.

I'm wondering how they'll deal with the existing telecoms also. They enjoy a nice monopoly generally and I don't think they're going to give it up too easily.

I'm guessing you mean 600 in revenue, per year.

Yep :)