“The city of Amsterdam has been involved for several years in building Citynet, a partnership between the city and two private investors to wire 40000 Amsterdam buildings with fiber. And it’s not just fiber, it’s open access fiber – any ISP can sign up to use the infrastructure and deliver ultra-fast Internet access. In 2008, the European Union ruled that the city’s involvement in the project was in fact legal, and that it was not improperly interfering in the market. We asked Herman Wagter, CEO of the company that built Citynet fiber project, to talk about how he got the job done, and to explain the challenges of rolling out fiber in a densely crowded European city.” In case you’re wondering: no, I don’t live in Amsterdam. My small hick town has plans for fibre too, however.
We are building for some years too a metropolitan fiber network in Bucharest called , guess what? Citynet.
Although I don’t know what’s the use since major ISPs offer FTTB and FTTH since few years ago.
Where the population density is so low that nobody is willing to pay what it will cost to lay the fiber compared to what people are willing to pay for the service, since current estimates for my area of western NH puts the break even payout somewhere around the 20 year mark if they charge 25% more on the basic plan than the local cable internet does for 22mbps/1mbps (their top plan)