Permits, Drawings, restoration, meeting the requirements for the right-of-way access and dealing with the glacial deposits of rocks etc, trenching can take over a year to return to the original condition, not accounting for the fact that the soil may not settle back the same way if there's any moisture.

I can tell you that boring is the standard by which you optimize many of these items.

Pole attachment costs can be the same or more than underground/boring if you need to upgrade or replace the poles, and it can take up to 180 days to get all the utilities on a pole to relocate, hence why google wanted one-touch make-ready rules to become the norm. They're not wrong, but the issue also is many people are illegally attached to poles, and in some of these rural areas the poles are actually the ORIGINALS from the REA expansion dating prior to the 1940s.

The goals of the county gap project and funding was to provide service to these areas. The problem is the tower may be 2-3 miles away and to hit these speeds, it requires more spectrum than is available, even if you use the RF Elements horn based antennas.

If the farm properties along the way are subdivided they can be connected for much lower cost in the future with this.

Not really, there's a few WISPs in the area already, there are logistical issues when it comes to terrain and tree cover that make it impractical.

Hard to remember things from nearly 30 years ago, but I do apologize for that.

There's also this thing known as a "pole denial" - aka no, you can't attach to that pole, which requires then doing something else, either setting your own pole or doing something alternative as a result. Just like mixing technology or environments (eg: Ubuntu vs Debian, or worse a RPM vs DPKG or Windows vs *BSD) having a mix of construction types can make your life more complex. I'm trying to optimize a lot of variables at once.

I'm glad you consider my plan smart.

It costs $7/foot in labor to install the conduits underground in a rural area. add another 50c-$2/foot for permitting and engineering and $1/ft for conduit and fiber and then multiply by road miles in the US and you have your answer on how much is needed.

(Citation: I own a Competitive Access Provider and do this type of work)

I WFH and have the entire network on UPS + now have 22kW generator as well so can survive blips without the network burping and longer outages without issues. I can tell when the speakers and printer go offline and come back, but otherwise I may not even notice when the power goes out unless the furnace is running. Otherwise no, I only shut down when rewiring or when doing a hardware swap/upgrade that requires it.

There is absolutely a first-mover incentive. My friends and colleagues who are building fiber say that when there is new construction if you're building fiber the incumbents will say "Oh, this area is covered" and will not build as there's no requirement to build since people aren't getting things like POTS anymore. If they're facing competition, they won't build in that area (for now). The construction managers will spend their budget someplace else.

The goal of the municipalities is to make the cost lower vs higher with permitting costs, etc.. Right now they're 15-50% of the costs between permits, engineering, etc.. much of it depends on where you are building.

microtrenching isn't the solution either, it's one method if an approved method. Commercial folks will quote $8-12/ft, and most people won't talk to you for less than a 250k or $1m project. Mine is less than that so while the distance is far (~13k feet) it's still not enough. You also can't do this yourself, to do a bore requires at least 2 people and a CDL because of weight of equipment, etc..

self funded. Going to cost me about 90-120k in direct or indirect costs to get started. It's necessary for my WFH options and does have a ROI, but it's also not a quick ROI. The alternatives are to move, but we're reasonably happy with the home. Some people do a remodel, this is my variant of it.

I can tell you much of the problem is about how to retrofit existing areas. New builds get fiber, but anything that existed before 2014 or so is a legacy build. I live in an area that was built in the late 90s and there's no hope of getting anything fast out here so I'm doing it myself. The costs are reasonable (about 30-50k/mile) but the majority of the issue is in permitting to go underground. (If you go on poles, it's actually just as expensive as underground in many cases due to annual fees on the poles, engineering studies, tree clearing fees, make-ready, etc.. Plus then you need to own a bucket truck and other expenses).

The wholesale cost of the bandwidth is nothing, it's all about the cost to put the stuff in the ground and the permit process. Expect 30% of your costs (and 90% of build-time) to be constrained by engineering and permitting costs. The rest of that 30-50k USD/mile cost is the labor and materials needed. You need to put in a place every 2-3 homes you pass to deliver service. There are a lot of people doing this in rural areas to close the gap but most people have only heard of the incumbents so there's a market awareness problem. Many people that are WISPs (see WISPA.org) are now moving into the fiber world, but the capital costs are around 50-250k to get all the equipment you need for underground construction.

Rough costs if you care: 35c/ft for conduit, 7-10c/ft for fiber (once you get large counts like 96 count, it's closer to 1c/strand/foot) and $100-300 for a pedestal or hand-hole, plus splice trays, etc. $1/foot (linear) * $1/foot (depth) for your route if it's not complicated. Costs go up in urban environments very quickly if you have a lot of requirements or other utilities to dodge.

What you're asking for is what's known as an APEX CNAME. Some DNS providers provide this sort of faux support (I think Cloudflare and Route53 do this) via some wizardry. There is an active discussion in the DNSOP WG at the IETF about this. Come join the madness!

This isn't related to that at all, it's not about the registrar and registry system. (You can thank ICANN for that). This is about software that has to workaround several types of bugs or legacy behavior. Imagine if your web browser still had to parse those gopher:// links