As the article mentioned above states:
Google recently announced that it chose nine metro areas around the country for potential Fiber deployments. The closest ones to New York City are Raleigh-Durham in North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. New York City already has fiber in the form of Verizon FiOS, and Google has focused mostly on underserved areas where municipal officials are willing to provide expedited permitting and other perks. There are still millions of Americans without broadband, so there are plenty of areas where Google Fiber is needed. One thing that is clear is that Google is building up its Fiber team. Job listings indicate that more than 60 positions are open. There is one other Google Fiber position open in New York, for a network infrastructure design manager.
But assuming you break bread with the Union types, a real big assumption, then what of the Franchise? That may take nearly forever. You can bet that if Comcast gets Time Warner that any chance another entity has of doing anything is zero, I have been there.
Lastly, the process of getting a Franchise may very well take forever. The costs are unbelievable. How then can one get any return on investment? That is the key question.
Also, if wireless keeps doing what it is doing and expanding data rates and lowering costs, then why build fiber at all?
The International Business Times lays out a more complete tale. They state:
Underneath Manhattan lies a vast labyrinth of tunnels that
was originally built for telephone wire after the Great Blizzard of
1888. It runs from all the way from downtown Manhattan to the Bronx, and
it's controlled by Empire City Subway (ECS), a Verizon subsidiary. Verizon claims that it maintains the tunnels, and it points
to its own fiber-optic FiOS network as proof. But critics, including
one of Verizon’s competitors, as well as other businesses that lease the
space to run their own cables through there, recently told Crain’s New York that the tunnels tell a different story:
"Conduits are filled with cables from defunct Internet providers that went belly-up after the dot-com bust in 2000. Verizon itself left severed copper wire in lower Manhattan ducts after installing a fiber-optic network following Superstorm Sandy. (The company says the cables could be easily removed, if needed.)"
The conduit system that could supply New York with Google
Fiber is a crowded mess, which is unlikely to change in the short term.
Why would Verizon clear the way for its competition?
Indeed, there are a plethora of obstacles. First the Franchise. We wrote of our recent experiences. That process is endless, meeting after meeting with every citizen having a say. Second is rights of way as discussed above. The incumbent has those rights, not the city. Try and displace them. Third is as mentioned above is the unions. New York makes Afghanistan look like the paradigm of correctness. I suspect there are unions to manage the "Porta Johns". Fourth, is the process of getting permits for this and that. Those who succeed in Real Estate have spent decades mastering this effort. A new guy on the street just cannot master the effort.
But remember the key factor. Wireless now is a winner. OFDM allows 10 bps/Hz, add to it adaptive beamformed antennae and we may get another factor of 5 to 10. Then HDTV can be compressed to 4 Mbps. Thus we can achieve a Gbps speed per user and can send a ton of video, which Verizon already has access to via FIOS. Ever wonder why they abandoned FIOS?
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