EPB launches America’s first community-wide 25 gig internet service

  Drive 10-20 miles, and you'll be in areas where AT&T decided to sell the lines
  to a bankrupt telco. Looking at the lines in those areas is entertaining. The
  telephone poles were installed by some ancient secret society named "GTE", and
  now have 20 degree bows. When lines loosen up and block traffic, the usually just
  tie them up on to some nearby tree branch.

The way I remember it GTE did not go bankrupt and instead became part of Verizon. Most of the Bay Area was PacBell (landline) territory, but there were a few pockets here and there where GTE had a monopoly. For wireless it was a different story with AT&T / CellularOne getting Side A and GTE / Verizon getting Side B with PacBell being relegated to the PCS band.

In fact I just took a quick peek at their Wikipedia page. GTE went bankrupt in 1933 and recovered. They were not part of the Bell system until 2000 when they were acquired by Bell Atlantic as part of the creation of Verizon.

Monopolies suck but GTE (and Verizon) were almost always better about building out higher speed DSL and fiber than PacBell/SBC/AT&T ever were.

It's extremely relevant for putting a multifamily / condo / apartment building on the internet.

25Gbit is plenty fast enough to service dozens of units - more than twice the downlink local loop speed DOCSIS4 has, and Comcrap is still on DOCSIS 3.x.

Nothing is ever ideal. The point is available SSD disk I/O bandwidth will exceed network bandwidth well above a gigabit.

And my point is that for 99% of people even 1Gb is overkill, so I'm not seeing why they expect Joe Smith to suddenly start buying $500 routers.

People may not realize just how many barriers are put in the way of this kind of thing happening and at every level of government you have skilled and experienced actors trying to make sure it doesn't happen.

The obvious one is states pass laws to forbid municipal broadband. This should be illegal. I actually wonder if the Federal government could override this since this sort of thing usually falls within the purview of the FCC but I'm no lawyer. Comcat, AT&T and Verizon all lobby hard to make municipal broadband illegal, even when they won't connect homes they have a legal obligation to connect.

But imagine it is legal and you've started an ISP. Your problems have just begun.

How are you going to run cables (fiber or otherwise) to people's homes? Are you going to dig trenches? Well you need permits for that. You might dig up someone else's cables so existing providers get to delay that process.

Or are you going to string those cables up on poles? Well, who owns the poles? It might be an existing ISP. There might be laws that allows you to string cables on those poles. Maybe there isn't. Maybe you have to pay an exorbitant amount for the privilege. Maybe Comcast is the only one legally allowed to do cable work and they'll charge you a fortune for it and take forever (and probably screw it up).

Even if the utility poles are owned by the city or the county but that doesn't necessarily solve your problem either. You need permits to string up cables. You might have to file a permit application for each pole individually. Even when you get a permit, existing users may have to move their cables to make room. They may have 90 days to move it. If several need to move cables then may well take the maximum time in turn.

Either through trenches or poles you eventually have cables. Where do you run them to? As in, are you running short cables to substations and then trunk lines back to an exchange? Or are you running long cables back to an exchange directly? Each has its problems.

The long cables may make too thick bundles for poles or require more expensive trenching. The shorter cables may require a substation that the locals view as an eyesore. You'll need to acquire land for that and may face NIMBYist opposition.

What I learned through exposure to this was that building an ISP is hyperlocal and the incumbents are way better at it. For example, there may be a lot of limestone in the soil that may make trenching slow, difficult and expensive. You may want to use poles instead but that might not be an option so you're stuck with disposing of a lot of limestone.

Dicalimer: Xoogler and I worked on Google Fiber for a time.