Google loves doing stuff like this. At my last company, before we sold it, I had to reverify our Google Business page about once a week because it would constantly just remove the verification for seemingly no reason.
It’s this way because of how regulated everything is. You have to jump through hoops to get permission to do anything here in the U.S. in other countries you just do it.
How do you plan for these things to get into buildings? Sewer, water, and power utilities are anywhere from 20’ deep to 2’ deep, so unless you want these robots aimlessly digging into utilities, you still need to disturb the ground above. Subway tunnels are generally very deep... 40’+ And verrrrry expensive.
To be fair, microtrenching sucks. It’s extremely difficult to dig around lines that have even micro trenched without damaging them. Our “micro trenches” are still 16” deep, but we stopped doing that. Our new stuff is a minimum of 24”, generally 36” deep. I know people who were doing it between 4-8” and I think that’s just plain stupid.
Generally looking at around $200,000 for one of those. They work great in certain areas. If you’re doing urban work like we are they’re not so great because there’s a utility every 10 feet.
I'd love to know where you can get a fiber circuit for $500/m. (And even if you can, then you probably can't compete with whoever's selling you that circuit anyway.) When we started we haggled considerably.. (had to sign a 20 year deal) and managed to get a 2G/10G circuit for $1,500/m. (A 1G circuit would have been $1200/m)
I’m already well aware there’s fiber on poles here. The difference is, their network isn’t built to support FTTH, it’s built to support a few larger enterprises that are willing to pay $3,000/m for a circuit. Name one person that doesn’t want fiber internet. Saying there isn’t a big enough market for service when literally every single household and business purchases internet is ridiculous.
We already have 60% of the street we just cut up signed up for service.
I think the key difference is that infrastructure is more of a long term investment. We can return 10x’s but it’ll likely take a little longer than a software company would. However, i can make the case that we have a higher guarantee of delivering than a software company can.
So Mimosa, one of the hardware vendors we use, does actually have this built-in to their firmware. The issue is, from what I've seen, is that it hops around too much. It also moves to congested channels sometimes. I'm sure there's a way to perfect it, we just don't have the time at the moment (I also don't believe they provide full API access yet, so I'm not even sure if we can change it without creating an automated UI tool that clicks around on a browser.)