The most expensive part is the "last mile" or hooking individual buildings up to the grid. What I propose is that the Federal government build fiber to each and every public school and university.
From there, leave it up to the individual state, county, and city governments to see if they want to front the real cost, which is the last mile.
You could even make it like the New Deal and only hire chronic unemployed workers (unemployed >6 months) and train them to lay the fiber. These newly trained workers can then be hired by the local governments who choose to complete the last mile from the national backbone.
It would at least give the unemployed work, the schools access to information, and let the rest of us to decide whether or not to pay the real cost.
Anecdotally that is why my small town of <10,000 has two small businesses that offer 100mbps fiber in town and wireless (at ~DSL speeds) out of town.
In the '90s, Iowa put down* fiber that runs right through our town, and these companies were able to tap in and offer it, first to businesses and in a central area, and then later to any homeowner that wants it, thanks to a grant to offset the cost of installation (but only if they offered service to the entire town, probably less than 20 square miles). I pay $70/mo including a local phone number and the money stays local.
This. Please repeat your story - from the media it would sound like Verizon FiOS and Google Fiber are the only players - when obviously there are lots of companies making fiber plays right now.
Then fewer people would believe these articles about "why you will never get fiber" - arguably that's false, since it is only necessary to move to a city that has it.
If the '49ers moved to California for gold, it's not so far-fetched to have a mass migration away from these backwards, oppressive places that still only have high prices for slow speeds.
Nearly 100 years ago the citizens of my rural locality built a co-operative telephone company. The organization still remains owned by the customers and, as such, have to act to the interests of those customers.
The result is that the entire service area – which consists of mostly farms, and some small town areas – have had DSL connections for more than a decade and they have been working to roll out fibre to those locations for the past few years.
If the citizens are going to pool their money to build infrastructure anyway, what advantage does the government model bring over the co-operative model?
In a rural area with a strong sense of community, a non-governmental cooperative can work pretty easily. In an area with more fighting and less community, you need government power of eminent domain to acquire the rights to intrude on people's land for infrastructural purposes.
Given the battles that are heating up over wind turbines, I'm not sure rural areas have any more sense of community than anywhere else. Though perhaps things were different a century ago.
The most expensive part is the "last mile" or hooking individual buildings up to the grid. What I propose is that the Federal government build fiber to each and every public school and university.
From there, leave it up to the individual state, county, and city governments to see if they want to front the real cost, which is the last mile.
You could even make it like the New Deal and only hire chronic unemployed workers (unemployed >6 months) and train them to lay the fiber. These newly trained workers can then be hired by the local governments who choose to complete the last mile from the national backbone.
It would at least give the unemployed work, the schools access to information, and let the rest of us to decide whether or not to pay the real cost.