"Fiber Economics - Quick and Dirty"

"Fiber Economics - Quick and Dirty" is a primer for those who want to understand the raw economics behind any fiber build—Lafayette's included. The author, Dave Burstein, uses examples from Google's build in the Kansas Cities and Australia's national broadband initiative as anchor points but the logic is clear and straightforward. Almost as valuable is Burstein's judgment on the current basic costs—there's no one more knowledgable.

As a taste:

Bandwidth isn’t free, but it’s darn cheap. A moderately sized carrier pays less than $1/month/customer http://bit.ly/N3kVKS. Google pays much less, while small and rural carriers sometimes pay much more. Bandwidth use goes up only modestly with higher speeds; the industry rule of thumb is about 1/3rd more usage if you give the customer higher speeds. A Netflix movie will come in at 2-4 megabits whether you have 12 megabit service or a gigabit. You don’t get more email because your connection is faster.

That's actually very interesting. What it means is that Google offering every customer a gig of connectivity does NOT result in their using 100 times as much data as the average american user. Faster speeds don't mean linearly faster costs. Not even nearly. Which is something we here in Lafayette should think about.