[niels_olson]

> those networks were far more heavily subsidized than our own.

BTW, didn't the US give the telecoms several billion to build infrastructure? Where did that go? And how far did it go? How much does it cost?

Let's say some bankers and lawyers and doctors buy out a 10,000 acre farm in coastal Virginia, 5 miles from the nearest stoplight of a medium-sized city, and they want gigabit ethernet to their McMansions and 3G coverage all the way into work. Essentially, a lollipop-shaped extension of network hardware into previously unpopulated land. What's it going to cost?

[tc]

Look, I don't support subsidies either. Like with most US subsidies, the money was probably mostly wasted (but I'm sure it created jobs).

In all seriousness, telecom subsidies in the US mostly go to building out old-fashioned POTS lines and slow DSL into corn fields in the middle of nowhere. Don't blame the telecoms (except for the lobbying of the huge ones), that's what the grants specify.

AT&T has been spending big money supporting and astroturfing Internet Neutrality. If you don't understand why that would be, you don't understand the dynamics of the industry enough to know what is really going on. They aren't doing that out of the goodness of their hearts. This is the old struggle between the LECs and the cable franchises.

Internet Neutrality is a win for AT&T and the LECs because they already have a separate network (the time-division network) that doesn't rely on packet prioritization to deliver latency-sensitive media.

[tptacek]

High tens of millions of dollars is my guess, between right-of-ways and spectrum licensing. The routers themselves might not even break a million, though.

[tc]

Yes. Building out fiber to a single point would be the easy part (as low as hundreds of thousands of dollars, perhaps). The continuous 3G coverage would be expensive though.