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Aggressively throttling comments. I think it's about five comments and then HN cuts you off from commenting. Not really conducive to discussions.

So what's stopping you? :)

Just get some neighbors together and go for it.

Manhattan?

Title III crowdfunding is limited to $1M.

What happened to Citynet? They were supposed to wire the whole of Amsterdam with open access fiber. Did they stop after the Reggefiber/KPN acquisition?

"A little longer" == 25 years if your returns are 10% and grow 10% annually.

Other than than all true. Telecoms infrastructure is an utility play, steady long term returns. Something pension funds like, but they on the other hand don't like risky startups, so it's a challenge to get funded until you are established and have a solid track record.

No, the returns aren't there to make infrastructure investments attractive to VCs.

A software startup can exit at 10x, an infrastructure investment won't.

> However, from my understanding, a direct connection to the internet backbone is what gives tier q ISP's their God-like monopolizing power in a given region (like Comcast in most parts of Baltimore city).

No, the reason Comcast and other incumbents dominate is that they built out the last mile infrastructure. The backbone costs are a minor expense.

How are you covering costs?

A Netflix cache appliance isn't dependent on the number of customers, it's on dependent on the amount of traffic from Netflix. You don't need 5000 Netflix customers, you need 5 Gbps of peak traffic to qualify.

However that isn't your only option. You can just peer with Netflix, they have an open peering policy.

Even a single cable in the sewer can require digging up the street if the cable causes an obstruction in the pipe.

Rule #1: Never install new copper in the outside plan.

That being said, there are companies specializing in installing fiber cables into sewers. They use tracked robots to install steel bands inside the pipes that keep the fiber cable in place. It's not cheap, but it is cheaper than ripping open the streets in a city.

There are also techniques to install fiber cable into water pipes.

I recall the NYCmesh people having free bandwidth from an employer or sponsor. That obviously helps. Not exactly scalable or replicable tho.

Anybody with enough money can connect to one or more IP transit providers ("the Internet backbone"). It will usually set you back a few thousand dollars per month.

> Fiber like GPON is shared physically-ish, but DWDM isolates individual waves so thoroughly that it's hard to think of that as a shared physical medium unless you're thinking about backhoe fade and the like.

This is incorrect. GPON does not use DWDM, or any individual waves per subscriber. GPON is a shared medium with one wavelenght used in the upstream and one wavelenght used in the downstream direction. Each subscriber is allocated bandwidth on the shared medium.

Not even next generation PON uses DWDM. Next generation PON still uses on upstream and one downstream wavelenght per PON tree, but there can be multiple PON trees on the same backhaul fiber. It's more like a CWDM overlay of PON trees.

The only PON that uses DWDM is WDM-PON, but it isn't deployed commercially at scale yet.