So wait, a good deal from an ISP requires just the right Goldilocks zone of not-too-rural and not-too-urban, and for some reason almost nowhere in the US qualifies even though it's more-common in other countries?

That doesn't really pass the smell-test, especially not compared to other explanations like national differences in regulation and competition.

I cannot comment on the cost in the US, but in the UK it would be the farm that’s more expensive because the cost is relative the distance. You still have to file the same government applications to close a dirt road as you would a busy city street. But you would have much more miles of road to file the application for, plus the actual expense of the engineering work, for rural destinations.

And that’s without factoring in that fewer subscribers are going to sign up in rural destinations vs busy urban hubs.

This is why the UK had to make subsidies available for rural fibre.

> Imagine tearing open a busy street in NYC for a few weeks to install fiber

Or you can just run new fiber in the pipes that contained copper wiring that has most likely already been swapped out for fiber in the 1990s. Or just add better line equipment and use those same fibers already there.

I don't think you need to tear open busy streets to install fiber. In my area we got fiber (up to 10G now) and they didn't open any trench.

Mamdani just mentioned yesterday that he was investigating streamlining permitting processes. I imagine this would be a perfect time to push to improve this.

Don't you already have conduits, or undergrounds where old telephone lines are running already? That's what we used to install optical fiber everywhere in cities France. Really easy, nothing to tear open. And because it's dense, it's cheap per home.

On the other hand, rural areas require to digging a lot of kilometers of trenches just to connect a few houses. Much more expensive per home.

And yet the root comment claims the opposite (the US is very stretched out, so it’s harder to connect all of it).

In my country, fiber is run to my apartment building and through the technical shafts. Very easy for the telco: to connect a unit, they only need to branch off from the technical shaft. I imagine the total cost to connect 200 apartment units is much lower than connecting 200 farms or 200 houses in the suburbs, even with the red tape.

Imagine providing fibers in city such as London, Paris or Geneva. Oh wait.