I'll take the FTTH and leave Comcast and Century Link behind, thank you very much.
Would be even better if the City charged you for the fiber link and then let you select your backend provider. E.g., the way consumer choice works in the electric space. Let the city run/own the cable, and let the back-end carriers compete to provide the backbone and value-added services. Give every house a basic connection that lets them interact with city and state services only, for free.
Maybe you're willing to pay more. Most people probably aren't. (FiOS uptake rates are under 40% even though its always been much faster than competing cable services.) And the brutal economics of fiber really punish you for that. If your uptake rate goes from 50% to 33%, your per-subscriber costs have to go up to compensate (which puts even more downward pressure on your uptake rate).
I image that $150/mo average include cable and landline? I spent between $35-65/mo at my last 3 apartments (CA, KS, MO) for ~100-200mbps through Comcast for internet only.
I'm not sure I understand your first point? TV is a major part of the economics of fiber deployment. Chattanooga's fiber system also includes TV, so does Google Fiber. As to your second point--have you ever had FiOS? Verizon's wireline division is run like old-school AT&T--FiOS is very high quality.
I have used FIOS for the last 5 years. For a while they where throttling Netflix just like the Cable companies, so better sure but they also wanted to kill net neutrality just like the cable companies.
As to TV, you spread the network costs over both internet AND cable TV and should include a portion of TV/equipment rental revenue when calculating payback periods. Cord cutters are significant, but many people still want cable TV channels and rent DVR's.
I agree you need to include TV revenue--that's why I threw in Verizon's $110 ARPU (which includes TV), and suggested that Boulder's more expensive system would have to hit an even higher number like $140 (including TV).
I'll take the FTTH and leave Comcast and Century Link behind, thank you very much.
Would be even better if the City charged you for the fiber link and then let you select your backend provider. E.g., the way consumer choice works in the electric space. Let the city run/own the cable, and let the back-end carriers compete to provide the backbone and value-added services. Give every house a basic connection that lets them interact with city and state services only, for free.