I'm sick of waiting for this in the U.S. How much is it to rent a microtrencher and wire up my neighborhood with fiber and then lease a university/municipal network uplink?
I think offering a sweet Internet connection to the whole neighborhood would be the "what you can do for them." Makes it more attractive for people to live there — and as a bonus, if people are paying their broadband fees to you and you live locally, it keeps in the money in the local economy, which most governments like.
Providing service to a neighborhood is considered "redlining" because it discriminates against all the neighborhoods that you don't serve. Thus the local government will probably require that you serve the entire city/county or nothing.
Organize a cooperative with your neighbors to purchase the capital equipment and sustain the costs to operate it. The initial "risk" will be shared and the members will derive a superior benefit by making profit and advertising costs (however minimal) unnecessary, and by allowing anyone willing and competent in the neighborhood to carry out tech support and installations.
Laying the fiber costs something like $1,000 per house and your uplink will cost over $2/Mbps/month (fortunately you can oversubscribe it 100:1 or more). That's not counting any of the equipment.
Laying in the fiber is a sunk cost, so that shouldn't be the biggest issue.
At two dollar per Mbps oversubscribed 100 times is $20 for each user/month, sell the service at $70 month, and you should have enough to turn a profit, pay back the investment and keep the thing operating.
Articles say Google's fiber network is estimated to cost between $3000 and $8000 per home. So at that rate, to wire up a block with 50 homes would be between $150000 and $400000.
Guess I'll stick with mesh networks and the barely-palatable porridge that SBC and Comcast are willing to give Detroit. We need some stimulus money up here.