FCC proposes to increase minimum broadband speeds to 100 Mbps

First, are you in a FCC regulated state, or one of the 21 that have passed their own pole regulations and have very different rules?

Have you negotiated a pole access agreement with the owner of the poles - which might be an electrical company, a municipality, or a Baby Bell? Some of those entities would love to see fiber internet in their community; others will be sure to make your life difficult because you are a competitor. And in some cases the ownership dictates the regulatory framework: a rural electric coop’s poles are handled differently from a municipalities, which are different from a telco.

Does your agreement/regulatory body allow you to do make ready work, or are you depending on the pole owner to do site surveys & line up engineering crews for the other utilities attached to the pole - likely telco, cable, maybe some existing fiber too? Are those poles also running electrical, in which case you’ve got even more headaches to deal with? Is the pole owner or anyone attached to the pole going to try to slow you down by claiming your changes are complex and need additional oversight?

Are you willing to wait, if you are required, for each other utility on the pole to send their engineers out to move their lines so you’re ready to place yours?

Alternatively: you negotiate an agreement with a city to trench in their right of way. One set of local regulators to work with. Looks appealing in comparison, no?

To do some quick math, let's take the median monthly salaries of both Kazakhstan and USA, 364,000 KZT ($755) and 3,500 USD per month respectively.

That means that the $10/month 500Mbps symmetrical fiber is about 1.32% of median monthly wage in Kazakhstan. For the US, 1.32% of 3,500 USD is about $46/month.

Looking at the AT&T website, they offer 500Mbps symmetrical fiber for $65/month + taxes. So yes, the US internet is more expensive by about 50%.

However one should still ask - well, maybe AT&T provides better service? I don't know whether AT&T is a better provider than your Kazakhstan ISP, but some points to consider are:

- Can you have a connection uptime of 6 months without interruptions and it's just business as usual and not an achievement? (In Estonia I have router & connection uptime measured in years. When I lived in the US, my Xfinity connection dropped for a few minutes every week.)

- Does the ISP have excellent global peering? Poor peering can result in much higher latencies to international destinations, and also much lower bandwidth. (In Estonia I know all the budget ISPs buy (as opposed to build) their international traffic and oversell it, which means connections across oceans are at quarter of the advertised speeds at peak hours.)

- Is the last mile cabling cost eaten by the ISP, or will they demand you to pay for its building?

1Gbps to 10Gbps has some tangible benefits like downloading large games in a fraction of the time, or doing super fast backups.

However when you have 25Gbps, you have a pipe twice as large as is common in standard hardware. You usually see yourself limited by 10Gbps peering links or by endpoints with only 10Gbps NICs.

And of course 25Gbps is faster than most conventional storage, you need very high-end NVMe or RAID to keep up.

If I'd have had to pay a bit extra every month, I probably wouldn't have done it. But since it was just the price of the hardware plus installation, I thought it was worth trying.